Here’s the windup, the pitch, the vector and the Pythagorean theorem
The Science of Baseball Program was created by Ricardo Valerdi, an associate professor of systems and industrial engineering at the University of Arizona.
Valerdi designed the program to get middle school students interested in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math by teaching various concepts through the lens of baseball.
“The idea,” Valerdi said, “is if you interact with the math, you begin to understand it much better.”
The program has reached about 2,000 kids and gained the attention of major league teams including the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Since creating the program last fall, Valerdi has developed a curriculum of eight lessons, all of which focus on the common core standards that middle school students must master for standardized tests.
It covers subjects such as geometry, measurement and data, ratios and proportional relationships, and statistics and probability.
The standards are taught in the classroom and in an outdoor, hands-on fashion.
Drew McCullough 