Rising Salaries
of
Professional Athletes
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The original purpose of this activity was to find one classroom from each N.B.A. (National Basketball Association) city and have them develop a system that is more manageable to pay each professional basketball player on their home team. This would have been more of a collaborative project with ongoing communication between the various classrooms. With the constraints of a summer time frame, the purpose became to find participants who would develop a point system and salary scale for 3 popular (over-paid) professional basketball players. Once the scale was developed, they would calculate and determine what the players' salary should actually be.
My personal goals were to develop an online collaborative project, create a workable interactive web page where participants could submit work and responses, and further enhance my web creation abilities using Microsoft Front Page.
Proposal based on Al Roger's format.
Participants developed a point system to pay the chosen athletes and presented the information and statistics in a Microsoft Excel Worksheet. Besides using computer skills and mathematical calculations, students also had to use critical thinking and problem solving skills. The three scales created by the participants (Adam, Jenny, and Brian) can be viewed here. From the feedback I received from each participant, it took an average of 30 minutes to complete the activity.
Ideally, this activity will be integrated into a middle school math curriculum and possibly economics if available, and should last approximately 4 months.
The three participants (all teachers), realized just how outrageous professional athletic salaries, especially compared to a meaningful profession such as teachers. I expect that the student participants in the fall will come to the same realization.
I think that although this project was able to be completed, it will be more beneficial when participants are analyzing data every game, collaborating and communicating with other classrooms across the country, and working in a group atmosphere.
The project is available online.
One of the major problems that I noticed was that my example had too much influence on the scale created by the participants. Because of that, they all derived quite similar salaries for each player. In a complete season project, this most likely would not happen because all players statistics would be analyzed instead of the 3 that were assigned.
My plan for the school year is the following: Since there will be 26 classrooms participating, I would like to develop some sort of communication after every game. For example, if the Boston Celtics play the Miami Heat, it would be great if sometime in the next day or so, the two classes from these cities could discuss and analyze their data for that game. After every 10 games each class will post their current salaries, that way all participants can compare and contrast data. Once the 40 games have finished and all data is submitted, I will post a completed list of the entire league ranging from the highest salary to the lowest, along with how it was calculated.
I definitely learned that communication is very important in this type of activity. My original plan and set of directions were well planned, however when I changed my strategy to fit the summer schedule, I was not as specific and clear, which cause a few issues to arise. However, with the speed of communication with technology, these problems were easily solved. I think this created a good test run for the real project.
I am very confident that this project will be very successful in the fall. Being an avid basketball fan, I am very excited to see the creations that middle age students will derive.
