Basketball Math

What do basketball and math have in common? How do iPads come in to play?

Ms. Tarabochia ’95 and her math class are learning about parabolas and used their iPads to record each student’s basketball shots. Frames from the movies are used to display the arc, or parabola, of the shot as the ball goes from the player through the hoop.

Students used their data to plot points on a coordinate plane. They found three ordered pairs their shot went through to calculate their quadratic equation for their shot. They used algebra learned int the previous chapter to calculate the coefficients needed to make their equation complete. Y doesn’t always equal mx+b.