march madness

Overview | How can the sports tournament bracket concept be applied to academic questions? How can competition enliven debate over perennial topics in your curriculum? In this lesson, students use the March Madness bracket structure to decide a question in their field of study, holding a research- and debate-based “tournament” to determine the “winners” of each round, until a final “winner” is declared. Along the way, they write essays about the last two topics standing, use the bracket to organize debates, and, perhaps, share their thoughts on N.C.A.A. tournament basketball.

Materials | Computer with Internet access and projectors, research materials, word-processing software and printing capability, or board or chart paper and chalk or markers

Note to Teachers | Aside from a way to organize debate on an academic topic, this activity might also be a fun, tension-lessening way to approach big decisions that require many students to vote. You might keep this structure in mind the next time students have to choose a class trip destination, school play, prom theme, or the like. Tell us how you adapt game formats like sports brackets for classroom use!

Warm-up | Have a student who is an avid March Madness fan explain the concept of the N.C.A.A. bracket to the class. If you have the technology handy, you might also show the short Tournament Tipoff video, above.

Be sure that students understand that “bubble crop” means the teams that made the tournament shortly before it started, through weighted calculations that take into consideration things like competition level of their conferences, and those teams thought to have the most potential to win the tournament start by playing those deemed the weakest. For fun, you might want to show the video of President Barack Obama revealing his own completed bracket.

If you prefer to limit discussion of basketball in class, you might use School Library Journal’s Battle of the Kids’ Books bracket or the ideas in the ArtsBeat blog post March Madness: The Geek Edition to illustrate how the system works. (ArtsBeat links to suvudu.com and shows a “cagematch” between characters from science fiction and fantasy literature like Gandalf, Dumbledore and Edward Cullen.)

Invite students to share ideas about how fans make their picks to fill in their brackets and the factors they consider. Ideas might include personal favorites, sentiment, player statistics and intuition.

Sketch on the board a blank bracket that starts with eight teams (or people or issues or books, etc.). Or, you can show students an online bracket, which will be useful to have on hand later in the lesson. (You can also follow directions here to create printable bracket sheets that fit your needs.)

Next, explain that the class will now consider a question to demonstrate and explore the way the bracket works. Pose the question, “If breakfast is the most important meal of the day, what is the best breakfast food?”

Ask students to brainstorm ten to twelve breakfast foods (knowing that only eight will “make” the bracket), considering nutritional value, convenience, taste, popularity, and so on. Invite them to think creatively about breakfast.

Their ideas might include whole-grain items such as oatmeal or polenta, toast with hazelnut spread, hash browns, cereal (“healthy” versus “sugary”), or even things like breakfast pizza or breakfast tacos.

Students might compose their own brackets in pairs at their desks, or you might choose to do this exercise as a whole class, using what you have sketched on the board or the online version.

Have students first brainstorm the most popular and healthful foods. Then, to help them choose the less obvious, or “bubble” foods, have them offer brief explanations of why each questionable food should make it, or not make it, onto the bracket. When you have come up with the final list, have students make the match-ups, pitting what they believe will emerge as the most important foods against the least important in the first round.

For example, whole-grain oatmeal might meet chocolate donuts there, only to face more formidable opponents, like egg-white omelets, in subsequent rounds. Depending on how much time you can devote to this activity, you may let students draw on previous nutrition knowledge or have them consult the U.S.D.A. National Nutrient Database as they make their arguments.

Designate two students, each championing one option, to debate for each set of brackets in the first round. Set a time limit of one minute for each. As judge, decide each winner quickly before moving on to the next round. Continue this way until you reach a winner, or allow students to vote in the final round(s). Remind them that as winning foods advance, the students arguing for them will likely repeat some information from earlier rounds, but they should also directly “face” each opponent, addressing relevant issues that arise in each match-up.

When the winner is chosen “most important breakfast food,” retrace its journey through the tournament, having students name all the foods it defeated. Do the same for the runner-up. Students should now be prepared to do this same exercise with more complex academic content.