The National Basketball Association (NBA) and Discovery Education have announced a partnership that will combine the passion for basketball and the real-world application of math problems.

The content will be available to over 3 million students in all 50 states and several Canadian provinces that have access to the Discovery Education Techbook series; Discovery Education is the leading provider of digital education content for U.S. K-12 classrooms.

Through the NBA Apply portion of the digital resources, favorite NBA and WNBA players and teams will help students learn a wide range of mathematical concepts.

With the NBA Math tool, students can "create their own formulas and visualize math concepts through histograms, scatter plots and box plots using NBA and WNBA statistical categories such as points, rebounds, steals, assists and blocks.”

The new collaboration is an attempt to use student interests and hobbies to help them also develop an interest for learning math concepts.

"Students quickly see that math is essential in basketball, while engaging in problems worth solving and learning about diverse careers in sports,” says Discovery Education on its website.

Names of basketball-related math problems include:

• Do the NBA and WNBA Courts Use True Rectangles?
• Can You Predict the Winner?
• Timing a Dunk Shot Takeoff

In addition to being supported by any device, the Math Techbook includes useful student tools like a graphing calculator, geometry tool and more and provides teachers with "a Student Dashboard to track a student's individual progress."

For teachers interested in bringing Discovery Education Techbook into their classrooms who do not already have access, they can get started on a free 60-day trial before making a commitment by clicking here and can see an example of an NBA math problem powered by NBA data here.

Find out more about the Discovery Education and NBA partnership here.

Nicole Gorman, Senior Education World Contributor

11/21/2016