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Hills-Beaver Creek High School students will take an avid interest in college basketball scores next month, thanks to a lesson in mathematics.
Representatives from Dordt College met with the H-BC sophomores, juniors and seniors in Nora Wysong’s math classes and outlined the March Madness Data Analytics Battle.
Mathematics associate professor Valorie Zonnefeld is in her third year of working with area high schools in the battle, which gives students a taste of how data can help answer questions and predict outcomes using a fun activity.
“You will create an algorithm that will choose 10 teams from the NCAA tournament, which are assigned a value from 10 to 1, with 1 being your top team,” she said.
Using Google spreadsheets, students were given access to stats from the past seven years of NCAA teams. Each team has up to 31 variables based on games played from 2013 to 2019.
Students decide which variables are the most important in predicting an NCAA winner, such as season wins or losses or percentages of three-point shots, free throws, or assists to turnovers made.
The algorithm students create can give more points to one or more areas.
“If you think there is something more important, put more weight on it,” Zonnefeld said.
Students compare their algorithms to the game results of more than one of the previous March Madness tournaments to see how the algorithm performs based on the stats they chose as comparisons.
The college teams selected by students receive points for games won and Cinderella teams (those seeded ninth or lower in the tournament) earn bonus points for winning.
“There are millions upon millions of ways to work the variables,” said Dordt College mathematics student Luke Den Herder.
The best score in the battle is 695 points, an unrealistic number to achieve.
“Around 200 is a fantastic score,” he said. “But 170-180 is a good score.”
Last year Central Lyon High School in Rock Rapids, Iowa, won the first-place battle with 206 points.
Development of the algorithms introduces high school students to statistics and data science, two in-demand career areas.
“Technology today can capture so many numbers,” Zonnefeld said. “Now we have to have people to interpret them.”
Wysong’s students are grouped in teams with each of the three classes competing against each other in a local school competition. They also will compete against other Iowa and Minnesota schools.
In 2019, 277 teams participated.
Students have until March 13 to submit their top-ten teams.
This is H-BC’s first year participating in the March Madness Data Analytics Battle.
Teacher Wysong views the students’ participation as a safe way to introduce students to statistics.
“Statistics for us — we tend to scare from,” Wysong said. “Kind of the fear of the unknown.”
In the two weeks since students were introduced to the battle, Wysong has noticed her students gaining more confidence working with statistics as they develop and test various algorithms.
“This is not done during my class time so it is even more exciting to see them working on this outside of school,” she said.