[BAG] Creator: Dan Stark
How BAG Combines Basketball and Math to Inspire Students
Dan Stark, the creator of BAG, has been teaching middle school math for Warren City Schools in Ohio for 13 years – and while he’s had a life-long fascination with both mathematics and teaching – he’s also had occasional difficulty passing on his passion for numbers to some students.
“I’ve always been around and fascinated by numbers, especially in sports,” says Dan, “and every year when I teach the concepts of mean, median, mode, or fractions, decimals, and percents, or ratios and proportions, or even graphing and I see how difficult it is for some kids to grasp, it’s frustrating in that no matter how hard I try, I can’t pass along that interest.”
This year, thanks to BAG, Dan has a new way to address these issues, especially with the students who enjoy playing basketball. “One of the reasons that I created BAG is that the game is a means to get my students involved in numbers, the same way I originally got interested in numbers as a kid: the stats and scoring in sports; something very fun and involving that kids can play with their friends or by themselves, yet uses math on a variety of levels.”
“The ‘fun-factor’ of BAG is going to give me and many teachers in my same predicament a novel way of communicating numbers with more hesitant students. The cool thing about BAG is these concepts can be introduced to kids after a weeks worth of playing BAG in PE class and suddenly the numbers actually start to mean something! It’s a way of showing them that math can and will perpetually be useful in all sorts of ways”.
This ‘fun and focus’ aspect of BAG has yet another, promising side for educators: “I am really looking forward to see how kids who are identified with attention or inability to focus issues, take to the game of BAG – because, you see BAG forces the player to focus. They must focus when they are shooting, must focus on retrieving the rebound before the ball goes out of bounds or face a penalty stroke, as well as keep score – because in BAG every single shot counts (just like golf).”
Top-level lessons with innovative training techniques
Teachers Learn
- How to play the game of BAG and master it’s unique scoring by shooting a round or two with colleagues
- How to create their own BAG courses to meet the needs of ALL of their students
- How to align BAG to your state’s Academic Content Standards
- How to play BAG using any of the many variations and modifications
- How to run a class or school BAG tournament
In Person Training
If your school or district decides to give BAG a shot, then we will set up a mutually convenient time with the PE teachers where we can meet in a gym for a 1 to 3 hour BAG Professional Development for Physical Education Teachers so that they experience BAG first hand!
Add [BAG] to Physical Education Class
- Great cardiovascular exercise
- A game that requires students to work together
- Encourages creativity for it allows student’s to create their own courses
- Promotes sportsmanship, honesty, and integrity
- Students will have fun shooting a basketball, while working independently in groups
- Scorecards can be used to evaluate student progress – holds students accountable for task at hand
- Applies mathematics across the curriculum in that students are responsible to keep their own score
- Teachers can hold a Class or School BAG Tournament
- Aligns with state’s Physical Education Academic Content Standards
Used by Educators and Enthusiast
