Is a series of single digit numbers really that hard to mentally add up? Seems that many high school golfers think so. Even as a senior excelling in calculus, my golfer daughter and her competitors would whip out their cell phone calculators after a round to add up their scores… for 9 holes!

It’s really not that hard, however, as evidenced by the NBC Learn video Science of Golf: Math of Golf Scoring, produced in partnership with the United States Golf Association (USGA) and Chevron. Use the video to explore the mental math, number lines, and positive/negative numbers with your students.

Take a look at all of the videos in the Science of Golf series and see which ones will boost your STEM efforts. The videos are available cost-free on www.NBCLearn.com. Don’t have time to play all of them and the synopsis in this blog series just isn’t quite enough information? Open the video and, on the viewer window or Cue Card, you’ll see a Transcript tab. Click that and you’ll find the verbatim transcript of the video. Scan the transcript for a quick overview of what’s in store. You can also “select all” and copy/paste into a document for later reference.

We hope you will try them out. When you do, please leave comments below each posting about how well the information worked in real-world classrooms. And if you had to make significant changes to a lesson, we’d love to see what you did differently, as well as why you made the changes. Leave a comment, and we’ll get in touch with you with submission information.

–Judy Elgin Jensen

Image of his first time to break 80, courtesy of Joe Cascio.

Video

SOG: Math of Golf Scoring how golf scores are tabulated and totaled, and introduces the concept of par. It also shows alternate methods of calculating scores, including that of adding up the differences relative to par, whether positive (over par) or negative (under par).

STEM Lesson Plan—Adaptable for Grades 7–12

The lesson plan provides ideas for STEM exploration plus strategies to support students in their own quest for answers and as well as a more focused approach that helps all students participate in hands-on inquiry.

The SOG: Math of Golf Scoring lesson plan describes how one might compare different mathematical methods of scoring or averaging data.

You can use the following form to e-mail us edited versions of the lesson plans: [contact-form 2 “ChemNow]