Maps, Math, and Basketball

The NCAA National Basketball Championship starts tonight if you count the play-in games. Google has created a couple of sites to help you keep up with tournament news. One of those sites is a college basketball tournament map. On the map you will find all of tournament venues and all of the locations of the colleges whose teams are playing in the tournament. Google has included a measuring tool in the map that you can use to measure how far each team had to travel to play in the tournament.

Applications for Education

Have students measure how far each team had to travel in order to play in the tournament. Then have them track the performance of each team throughout the tournament to see if teams that traveled 1000 miles or more performed better or worse than teams that did not have to travel as far.