all right how’s everybody doing today
long day I’m glad you guys are keeping
up the energy so first off I’d like to
thank everyone over it for hosting this
wonderful event and thank you all for
coming in to hear what myself and
everyone else has to say today um so
just a little bit of background on
myself so my name is John Dresden I’m a
lecturer at the Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute in Troy New York and I’m also
for the past 5 years I’ve been the stem
director for 4th family incorporated
which is a grassroots nonprofit based
out of Albany New York so I know that we
just met but I kind of have a confession
to make which is strange for people who
have their doctorate in biomedical
engineering
alright when I was a kid I really didn’t
enjoy math or science so to be honest I
was I was pretty good at it because I
knew my parents would ground me if I
didn’t get good grades but it wasn’t
something that I really enjoyed so in my
free time I didn’t really want to do
robotics I wasn’t really into that and
rather hang out my friends or play
basketball so this sterling example of a
6/8 string bean all right I was 175
soaking wet all right so I’m once I’m
like 250 right now at 6 8 so imagine me
with a lot less weight all right so I
got pushed around a little bit in
basketball but the thing is that what I
wanted to be able to do is I want to be
able to succeed on the basketball court
so one day I was at a basketball game
and my team was gonna win if I could get
a rebound so I tried to get the rebound
I went up went for it and I got pushed
right out of the way the other team got
the ball they scored a layup and we lost
so I was pretty upset about it say the
least and right after the game I was
still hot and sweaty my physics teacher
came up to me and said John you weren’t
paying attention in class and I said
what are you talking about he goes if
you were paying attention in class you
would have gotten that rebound I’m like
forget you I’m still frustrated annoyed
yeah he goes John trust me come in after
school tomorrow and we can go through it
so this teacher so I went after school
and I listened to him and this teacher
actually showed
me.how biomechanics is tied to physics
and how mechanical advantage underpins
everything within sports and all of a
sudden I was like wow this is amazing I
can’t believe that I didn’t understand
that I could apply math and science into
an activity that I really enjoyed so
what I ended up doing is I ended up
going to Geneseo where I studied physics
in undergrad and I played four years of
college basketball and I also had the
opportunity to pursue my interest in
biomechanics where I built my own
primitive sports science lab as part of
a senior junior senior project for
physics and as a result I ended up going
to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
where I just finished up my doctorate in
July so I’m pretty excited about that
and I’m now a I’m now a member of the
faculty as a lecturer where I teach
introduction to engineering courses and
get to do some engineering research so
one of the things that I did when I
first came back into Albany is one of my
good friends from the from the Geneseo
basketball team reached out to me so
this is a gentleman by the name of John
Scott I played basketball with him for
one year and pretty much I moved back to
the area and he said hey John I just
started this program called forth family
where we’re trying to show kids how they
can use basketball to succeed both on
and off the court so we’re looking for
someone to tutor so to our kids and then
also to to teach our big men how to get
rebounds how to play etc etc etc and so
I started coaching and tutoring and what
I realized was the best way that I could
coach the kids was to bring in my own
analytical background and the best way
to tutor and mentor the kids was to
relate things to basketball so I started
trying to do these things and during one
of the after-school sessions we started
talking about LeBron James or kind of
shooting shooting something just talking
back and forth all right and we started
talking about LeBron James and one of
the kids started asking me why can
LeBron James dunk like he does like
because I’m 6-8 to 50 LeBron James is
6-8 to 50 there’s a big difference
between my jumping ability in his
so what we ended up talking about is we
started getting into and once again I’m
kind of a nerd so I was up on the board
and I was writing out all these things
how your muscles work etc and I ended up
putting on a tiny little clinic in
muscle mechanics I almost at a graduate
level and I was talking to these
students and I realized I realized that
they were paying attention you know they
were paying attention
I thought wow this is a this is a good
lesson I didn’t realize that they’d
really engage with that it wasn’t until
the next week where I had two kids
talking in the back of the classroom
during my session and I was about to
yell at him but I walked over to listen
to what they were saying and I realized
that one kid was explained to the other
that something inside your muscles is
climbing over each other and then that’s
why bran can dunk like he does okay and
as a graduate TA and working with
college students on muslimah Kent like
that’s a non-trivial thing to understand
and the thing is that I know for a fact
that both of these kids were
spectacularly failing biology and yet
they’re talking to each other about
these advanced topics so why are these
kids so engaged when we relate things to
sports okay and what is that missing
component because to be honest I’ve been
eating living and breathing sports and
science for the past ten years and these
connections have become very very
apparent to me so the thing is that why
do I automatically understand that
sports science is helpful for basketball
and doing well in science and math could
help me as a player and these kids can’t
okay and honestly the thing that I
realized was that I’ve been very
privileged in the way that was brought
up okay I came up in a loving two-parent
household both my parents went to
college so I had role models so I could
look at and say if I want to do well I
need to do well in school so once I I
had the capacity to be able to do math
and science because I was expected to
and then at a later point I could pivot
into the passion that I had so the
question is how can we use this passion
that kids have for sport
and how could we sit there and get
diverse kids into math and science
careers so students future careers are
influenced by their favorite pastimes
so if you have a kid who really likes
math and science okay or has fun
watching BattleBots alright on TV or
something like that alright it’s not
that difficult to get them to sign up
for after-school stem program okay if
the kid’s parents are in the picture and
they say hey you need to do well in your
math and science classes maybe you
should sign up for this Robotics Club
hopefully the kid will stick around and
then engage in those classes and the
nice thing is that so this is something
that they enjoy outside of school and
they can turn this into a career alright
a survey of FIRST Robotics participants
revealed that 60% of people who are
involved in after-school stem programs
go on to have at least one career
experience in stem ok on the other hand
if you have a kid who really enjoys
watching basketball or playing
basketball all right they spend all
their time thinking about basketball if
you look at what they spend their free
time on is their plan basketball
watching basketball doing all these
things so how can they go professional
in their interest in basketball similar
to the way that the kids in stem can go
professional in stem well they’d go to
the NBA or play overseas unfortunately
out of the millions of high school
students who play basketball only 0.3
percent of them make it to the NBA so I
knew pretty early in my life that I
probably wasn’t gonna go to the NBA so I
was able to pivot into stem and I had
sufficient resources and privilege in
the way that I was brought up where I
could make that transition however for a
lot of these kids where ball is life ok
there are systemic barriers to entry to
the traditional stem pipeline so things
that are very very trivial for example
will host free stem clinics ok the kids
that I’m working with they don’t have a
ride ok they can’t reach these resources
even though we really want to give it to
them okay so what we need to do is we
need to figure out how we can bridge
this gap
upon analysis I’ve realized that the
pipelines for basketball and for stem
have complementary strengths and
weaknesses so the traditional stem
pipeline has limited reach in some of
these areas however they have an
excellent career pathway on the other
hand the youth basketball pipeline has
huge reach ok millions of kids play high
school sports and that doesn’t include
the kids who love Steph Curry what love
watching them play basketball love
playing basketball with their friends
alright love to Kay all right I had a
kid in one of my programs who would just
yell all the time to Kay all day okay
like that’s the really popular
basketball video game and so the thing
is that they love it however there’s not
a good way to transition them into
careers and so the thing is that
basketball has become a tech enterprise
okay in the past decade analytics and
sports science has revolutionized the
National Basketball Association this can
be seen from the installation of
advanced tracking technologies such as
sports viewer Noah in the rafters of NBA
arenas to the development of high-level
sports science labs like p3 where every
single person who’s going to get drafted
for the NBA Draft go there to train so
that they can optimize their performance
number so they get drafted higher and
make more money and are more successful
okay as a result the number of people in
front office’s for the NBA who are
dedicated to sports science analytics
has had an exponential growth between
2008 and 2016 okay so the question is
how can we utilize sports science
analytics to broaden the reach of the
stem pipeline to these previously
excluded kids so how do we create an
authentic yet accessible introduction to
stem using sports analytics so the first
thing is that we need to situate
programs within existing youth
basketball programs as a training tool
okay we need to meet the kids where
they’re at okay we need to go into the
communities of practice that they’ve
established and take advantage of those
networks and capitalize on that to
deliver this content and then second we
need to provide youth players with
accessible analytical tools so that they
can explore and analyze their own
performance and improve on it
so one of the big things I didn’t like
about math and science when I was
growing up was the fact that I felt like
I was just painting by numbers the
teacher always knew what the answer was
I wasn’t given room to explore okay so
what we need to do is we need to be able
to provide tools to these youth players
so that they can act as scientists on
the court and make their own connections
so as I’ve said we can use basketball
training as a venue for engagement in
science and engineering so I’m a
biomedical engineer I can make things
that’s what engineers do we make things
that work they’re not always pretty okay
so what I did is along with
collaborators at RPI is I’ve built a
low-cost combine that we can have kids
use so they can measure their own sports
performance and once again we situate it
within the community itself it’s right
here you can see that the kids are in
basketball jerseys because I literally
brought this to a basketball practice at
Albany High and you can see that we have
one kid running the equipment and the
other kids jumping so typically what
I’ll do is I’ll collect will have
everyone collect data and then I’ll make
a graph like this where it reads
vertical junk by position for men’s
basketball at Albany High School so I
compared the students by position and
then also by JV and varsity so we
collected data on everybody and if you
notice the center’s had the lowest value
for the JV team and they were getting a
lot of grief for that all right so one
of the JV centers had a higher vertical
so he started complaining saying look
like that is it my score like what is
this line thing I said well that’s
called an error bar says well what’s an
error bar said well that’s a standard
deviation and pretty much I explained
that standard deviation is a
representation of the amount of distance
between all these different points for a
single category so once he understood
that he walked around practice and y’all
have bums ah the reason why we have
those error bars there is because I jump
higher than everyone else so that isn’t
my fault
okay so the fact that these students are
taking traditional stem content and
using it to justify their performance is
huge so what we’ve done I mentioned that
we made an entire combine so in addition
to just doing one-off clinics we also do
camps so I had the pleasure to work with
LaMarcus Aldridge of the San Antonio
Spurs two summers ago this summer I ran
a basketball camp with Emmanuel mudiay
of the Denver Nuggets and it’s been
either in Albany or water valley so what
we did is together me and my high school
students from already high in a few
other places we built the NBA Rookie
combine using Arduinos and about a
budget of $250 and what we did is we
created a analytical package where
students receive their all the campers
receive their own sports science
evaluations using low-cost equipment and
they all got their sports science
evaluations back and we’re able to
discuss with them like art this is what
you need to work on if you want to build
this yourself here’s the plans etc and
the students were very engaged so I just
talked about science and engineering so
we can also teach math using these
approaches so I gotta say one of the
biggest aha moments of my life when it
came to using analytics within sports
was when I saw these graphs by Kirk
Goldsberry so this graph more or less
shows you spatially on a basketball
court where it’s effective to shoot from
where it’s efficient to shoot from so
from here any basketball player can take
a look on this and it’s intuitive you
can say alright the best place places to
shoot for basketball are near the rim as
evidenced by that hot island in the
middle and then also from the
three-point line
so as soon as I saw these I started
thinking to myself how can I do this
myself how can I do this with my kids
okay so the one issue is that the way
that you collect this spatial shooting
data is typically with very expensive
camera systems which are out of reach
for many high school programs that I
know of alright so what we did is I
collaborated with some computer
scientists at Rensselaer and some other
and a few other people and we actually
built a computer program that allows
students to
select their own shooting data with a
piece of with a pen and paper and then
they’re able to enter it into an online
program that we made and they can make
their own shot charts so they can
understand their own performance so here
on this graph you can see that they make
the most shots close to the hoop and
then here this is a shooting efficiency
point so you can see that the most
efficient places to score from are very
close to the basket and by the
three-point line and once again the
students engage with this so what we can
do is we can see that so for example
when I did this program well I’ve done
this program a lot but one of the times
I did the program I printed this out
handed it to a post player and the post
players out there and said coach you got
let me shoot threes he goes no I’m not
gonna let you shoot threes and they
player handed him to his data sheet said
coach I score one point two points per
shot when I take a three-pointer the
coach said I can’t argue with that data
okay
so the thing is that the these tools are
allowing students to act as their own
advocates on the court even and they can
use it to discuss game strategy etc so
the question is I I’ve been very
anecdotal so far so I’m a scientist I’m
a researcher so one of the big things I
want to build you own about quantify the
results so on the upper left graph you
can see the question was do you think
you can use the topics you learn in math
in science class to make you a better
basketball player so the red shift or
the red the red histogram represents
their responses prior and the blue
represents afterwards you can see that
there was a huge increase in the self
perception of the students in the though
self-reported values that they said that
they firmly believe that they can use
math and science that they learned in
classes to improve his basketball
players we also asked them do you enjoy
using math and science outside of school
originally the average score was about a
three and after participating it
increased up to about a three point
three point four and you can see there’s
a dramatic shift to the right in terms
of the overall distribution and then
finally we asked them how interested are
you in studying math or science or
engineering in college and there was a
statistically significant increase among
students and one of the big things is
that once again these students are not
self selected for stem enrichment these
kids just want to play ball alright so
I’m very very proud of what we’ve been
will do with our programs so we’ve put
our student athletes in the position
where they can act as experts so this is
one of our students running a program
for a bunch of for a bunch of basketball
coaches down in Brooklyn this is one of
our students who’s running a program at
Pine Hills Elementary where he’s
explaining how the scientific equipment
works this is another student who’s
demonstrating how the user interface
works and then finally these students
have actually bought into the social
justice message and the research behind
it where they actually wrote a abstract
to an I Triple E education conference
and they presented their work down in
Princeton and they’re presenting
themselves as youth stem directors and
the big thing is that all of these
players are captains of their team’s
studying stem in college and playing
some sort of sport okay so the thing is
that this is not your typical
stereotypical or this is not your
stereotypical group of people who are
doing stuff so the big thing that I want
to leave you with is that sports that
has become a driver of social change if
you look at the places that athletes
have taken a stand
you have you have crisp sorry you have
LeBron James
cp3 Melo and Dwyane Wade sorry Dwyane
Wade make that powerful stand for social
justice at the ESPYs you have Colin
Kaepernick doing excellent work in the
community and the knee of LeBron James
doing marketing campaigns based on
equality okay the big thing is that
right now we can actually tap into these
athletes thirst for being advocates for
social justice and we can use it to
improve STEM education so the big thing
is that stem is everywhere all right
it’s in political campaigns it’s in
hospitals it’s in sports and it’s in all
those other things so the thing is that
what we need to do as stem professionals
is we need to find a group of kids that
we share interest with
and show them how they can use stem to
improve what they love to do alright
thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
long day I’m glad you guys are keeping
up the energy so first off I’d like to
thank everyone over it for hosting this
wonderful event and thank you all for
coming in to hear what myself and
everyone else has to say today um so
just a little bit of background on
myself so my name is John Dresden I’m a
lecturer at the Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute in Troy New York and I’m also
for the past 5 years I’ve been the stem
director for 4th family incorporated
which is a grassroots nonprofit based
out of Albany New York so I know that we
just met but I kind of have a confession
to make which is strange for people who
have their doctorate in biomedical
engineering
alright when I was a kid I really didn’t
enjoy math or science so to be honest I
was I was pretty good at it because I
knew my parents would ground me if I
didn’t get good grades but it wasn’t
something that I really enjoyed so in my
free time I didn’t really want to do
robotics I wasn’t really into that and
rather hang out my friends or play
basketball so this sterling example of a
6/8 string bean all right I was 175
soaking wet all right so I’m once I’m
like 250 right now at 6 8 so imagine me
with a lot less weight all right so I
got pushed around a little bit in
basketball but the thing is that what I
wanted to be able to do is I want to be
able to succeed on the basketball court
so one day I was at a basketball game
and my team was gonna win if I could get
a rebound so I tried to get the rebound
I went up went for it and I got pushed
right out of the way the other team got
the ball they scored a layup and we lost
so I was pretty upset about it say the
least and right after the game I was
still hot and sweaty my physics teacher
came up to me and said John you weren’t
paying attention in class and I said
what are you talking about he goes if
you were paying attention in class you
would have gotten that rebound I’m like
forget you I’m still frustrated annoyed
yeah he goes John trust me come in after
school tomorrow and we can go through it
so this teacher so I went after school
and I listened to him and this teacher
actually showed
me.how biomechanics is tied to physics
and how mechanical advantage underpins
everything within sports and all of a
sudden I was like wow this is amazing I
can’t believe that I didn’t understand
that I could apply math and science into
an activity that I really enjoyed so
what I ended up doing is I ended up
going to Geneseo where I studied physics
in undergrad and I played four years of
college basketball and I also had the
opportunity to pursue my interest in
biomechanics where I built my own
primitive sports science lab as part of
a senior junior senior project for
physics and as a result I ended up going
to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
where I just finished up my doctorate in
July so I’m pretty excited about that
and I’m now a I’m now a member of the
faculty as a lecturer where I teach
introduction to engineering courses and
get to do some engineering research so
one of the things that I did when I
first came back into Albany is one of my
good friends from the from the Geneseo
basketball team reached out to me so
this is a gentleman by the name of John
Scott I played basketball with him for
one year and pretty much I moved back to
the area and he said hey John I just
started this program called forth family
where we’re trying to show kids how they
can use basketball to succeed both on
and off the court so we’re looking for
someone to tutor so to our kids and then
also to to teach our big men how to get
rebounds how to play etc etc etc and so
I started coaching and tutoring and what
I realized was the best way that I could
coach the kids was to bring in my own
analytical background and the best way
to tutor and mentor the kids was to
relate things to basketball so I started
trying to do these things and during one
of the after-school sessions we started
talking about LeBron James or kind of
shooting shooting something just talking
back and forth all right and we started
talking about LeBron James and one of
the kids started asking me why can
LeBron James dunk like he does like
because I’m 6-8 to 50 LeBron James is
6-8 to 50 there’s a big difference
between my jumping ability in his
so what we ended up talking about is we
started getting into and once again I’m
kind of a nerd so I was up on the board
and I was writing out all these things
how your muscles work etc and I ended up
putting on a tiny little clinic in
muscle mechanics I almost at a graduate
level and I was talking to these
students and I realized I realized that
they were paying attention you know they
were paying attention
I thought wow this is a this is a good
lesson I didn’t realize that they’d
really engage with that it wasn’t until
the next week where I had two kids
talking in the back of the classroom
during my session and I was about to
yell at him but I walked over to listen
to what they were saying and I realized
that one kid was explained to the other
that something inside your muscles is
climbing over each other and then that’s
why bran can dunk like he does okay and
as a graduate TA and working with
college students on muslimah Kent like
that’s a non-trivial thing to understand
and the thing is that I know for a fact
that both of these kids were
spectacularly failing biology and yet
they’re talking to each other about
these advanced topics so why are these
kids so engaged when we relate things to
sports okay and what is that missing
component because to be honest I’ve been
eating living and breathing sports and
science for the past ten years and these
connections have become very very
apparent to me so the thing is that why
do I automatically understand that
sports science is helpful for basketball
and doing well in science and math could
help me as a player and these kids can’t
okay and honestly the thing that I
realized was that I’ve been very
privileged in the way that was brought
up okay I came up in a loving two-parent
household both my parents went to
college so I had role models so I could
look at and say if I want to do well I
need to do well in school so once I I
had the capacity to be able to do math
and science because I was expected to
and then at a later point I could pivot
into the passion that I had so the
question is how can we use this passion
that kids have for sport
and how could we sit there and get
diverse kids into math and science
careers so students future careers are
influenced by their favorite pastimes
so if you have a kid who really likes
math and science okay or has fun
watching BattleBots alright on TV or
something like that alright it’s not
that difficult to get them to sign up
for after-school stem program okay if
the kid’s parents are in the picture and
they say hey you need to do well in your
math and science classes maybe you
should sign up for this Robotics Club
hopefully the kid will stick around and
then engage in those classes and the
nice thing is that so this is something
that they enjoy outside of school and
they can turn this into a career alright
a survey of FIRST Robotics participants
revealed that 60% of people who are
involved in after-school stem programs
go on to have at least one career
experience in stem ok on the other hand
if you have a kid who really enjoys
watching basketball or playing
basketball all right they spend all
their time thinking about basketball if
you look at what they spend their free
time on is their plan basketball
watching basketball doing all these
things so how can they go professional
in their interest in basketball similar
to the way that the kids in stem can go
professional in stem well they’d go to
the NBA or play overseas unfortunately
out of the millions of high school
students who play basketball only 0.3
percent of them make it to the NBA so I
knew pretty early in my life that I
probably wasn’t gonna go to the NBA so I
was able to pivot into stem and I had
sufficient resources and privilege in
the way that I was brought up where I
could make that transition however for a
lot of these kids where ball is life ok
there are systemic barriers to entry to
the traditional stem pipeline so things
that are very very trivial for example
will host free stem clinics ok the kids
that I’m working with they don’t have a
ride ok they can’t reach these resources
even though we really want to give it to
them okay so what we need to do is we
need to figure out how we can bridge
this gap
upon analysis I’ve realized that the
pipelines for basketball and for stem
have complementary strengths and
weaknesses so the traditional stem
pipeline has limited reach in some of
these areas however they have an
excellent career pathway on the other
hand the youth basketball pipeline has
huge reach ok millions of kids play high
school sports and that doesn’t include
the kids who love Steph Curry what love
watching them play basketball love
playing basketball with their friends
alright love to Kay all right I had a
kid in one of my programs who would just
yell all the time to Kay all day okay
like that’s the really popular
basketball video game and so the thing
is that they love it however there’s not
a good way to transition them into
careers and so the thing is that
basketball has become a tech enterprise
okay in the past decade analytics and
sports science has revolutionized the
National Basketball Association this can
be seen from the installation of
advanced tracking technologies such as
sports viewer Noah in the rafters of NBA
arenas to the development of high-level
sports science labs like p3 where every
single person who’s going to get drafted
for the NBA Draft go there to train so
that they can optimize their performance
number so they get drafted higher and
make more money and are more successful
okay as a result the number of people in
front office’s for the NBA who are
dedicated to sports science analytics
has had an exponential growth between
2008 and 2016 okay so the question is
how can we utilize sports science
analytics to broaden the reach of the
stem pipeline to these previously
excluded kids so how do we create an
authentic yet accessible introduction to
stem using sports analytics so the first
thing is that we need to situate
programs within existing youth
basketball programs as a training tool
okay we need to meet the kids where
they’re at okay we need to go into the
communities of practice that they’ve
established and take advantage of those
networks and capitalize on that to
deliver this content and then second we
need to provide youth players with
accessible analytical tools so that they
can explore and analyze their own
performance and improve on it
so one of the big things I didn’t like
about math and science when I was
growing up was the fact that I felt like
I was just painting by numbers the
teacher always knew what the answer was
I wasn’t given room to explore okay so
what we need to do is we need to be able
to provide tools to these youth players
so that they can act as scientists on
the court and make their own connections
so as I’ve said we can use basketball
training as a venue for engagement in
science and engineering so I’m a
biomedical engineer I can make things
that’s what engineers do we make things
that work they’re not always pretty okay
so what I did is along with
collaborators at RPI is I’ve built a
low-cost combine that we can have kids
use so they can measure their own sports
performance and once again we situate it
within the community itself it’s right
here you can see that the kids are in
basketball jerseys because I literally
brought this to a basketball practice at
Albany High and you can see that we have
one kid running the equipment and the
other kids jumping so typically what
I’ll do is I’ll collect will have
everyone collect data and then I’ll make
a graph like this where it reads
vertical junk by position for men’s
basketball at Albany High School so I
compared the students by position and
then also by JV and varsity so we
collected data on everybody and if you
notice the center’s had the lowest value
for the JV team and they were getting a
lot of grief for that all right so one
of the JV centers had a higher vertical
so he started complaining saying look
like that is it my score like what is
this line thing I said well that’s
called an error bar says well what’s an
error bar said well that’s a standard
deviation and pretty much I explained
that standard deviation is a
representation of the amount of distance
between all these different points for a
single category so once he understood
that he walked around practice and y’all
have bums ah the reason why we have
those error bars there is because I jump
higher than everyone else so that isn’t
my fault
okay so the fact that these students are
taking traditional stem content and
using it to justify their performance is
huge so what we’ve done I mentioned that
we made an entire combine so in addition
to just doing one-off clinics we also do
camps so I had the pleasure to work with
LaMarcus Aldridge of the San Antonio
Spurs two summers ago this summer I ran
a basketball camp with Emmanuel mudiay
of the Denver Nuggets and it’s been
either in Albany or water valley so what
we did is together me and my high school
students from already high in a few
other places we built the NBA Rookie
combine using Arduinos and about a
budget of $250 and what we did is we
created a analytical package where
students receive their all the campers
receive their own sports science
evaluations using low-cost equipment and
they all got their sports science
evaluations back and we’re able to
discuss with them like art this is what
you need to work on if you want to build
this yourself here’s the plans etc and
the students were very engaged so I just
talked about science and engineering so
we can also teach math using these
approaches so I gotta say one of the
biggest aha moments of my life when it
came to using analytics within sports
was when I saw these graphs by Kirk
Goldsberry so this graph more or less
shows you spatially on a basketball
court where it’s effective to shoot from
where it’s efficient to shoot from so
from here any basketball player can take
a look on this and it’s intuitive you
can say alright the best place places to
shoot for basketball are near the rim as
evidenced by that hot island in the
middle and then also from the
three-point line
so as soon as I saw these I started
thinking to myself how can I do this
myself how can I do this with my kids
okay so the one issue is that the way
that you collect this spatial shooting
data is typically with very expensive
camera systems which are out of reach
for many high school programs that I
know of alright so what we did is I
collaborated with some computer
scientists at Rensselaer and some other
and a few other people and we actually
built a computer program that allows
students to
select their own shooting data with a
piece of with a pen and paper and then
they’re able to enter it into an online
program that we made and they can make
their own shot charts so they can
understand their own performance so here
on this graph you can see that they make
the most shots close to the hoop and
then here this is a shooting efficiency
point so you can see that the most
efficient places to score from are very
close to the basket and by the
three-point line and once again the
students engage with this so what we can
do is we can see that so for example
when I did this program well I’ve done
this program a lot but one of the times
I did the program I printed this out
handed it to a post player and the post
players out there and said coach you got
let me shoot threes he goes no I’m not
gonna let you shoot threes and they
player handed him to his data sheet said
coach I score one point two points per
shot when I take a three-pointer the
coach said I can’t argue with that data
okay
so the thing is that the these tools are
allowing students to act as their own
advocates on the court even and they can
use it to discuss game strategy etc so
the question is I I’ve been very
anecdotal so far so I’m a scientist I’m
a researcher so one of the big things I
want to build you own about quantify the
results so on the upper left graph you
can see the question was do you think
you can use the topics you learn in math
in science class to make you a better
basketball player so the red shift or
the red the red histogram represents
their responses prior and the blue
represents afterwards you can see that
there was a huge increase in the self
perception of the students in the though
self-reported values that they said that
they firmly believe that they can use
math and science that they learned in
classes to improve his basketball
players we also asked them do you enjoy
using math and science outside of school
originally the average score was about a
three and after participating it
increased up to about a three point
three point four and you can see there’s
a dramatic shift to the right in terms
of the overall distribution and then
finally we asked them how interested are
you in studying math or science or
engineering in college and there was a
statistically significant increase among
students and one of the big things is
that once again these students are not
self selected for stem enrichment these
kids just want to play ball alright so
I’m very very proud of what we’ve been
will do with our programs so we’ve put
our student athletes in the position
where they can act as experts so this is
one of our students running a program
for a bunch of for a bunch of basketball
coaches down in Brooklyn this is one of
our students who’s running a program at
Pine Hills Elementary where he’s
explaining how the scientific equipment
works this is another student who’s
demonstrating how the user interface
works and then finally these students
have actually bought into the social
justice message and the research behind
it where they actually wrote a abstract
to an I Triple E education conference
and they presented their work down in
Princeton and they’re presenting
themselves as youth stem directors and
the big thing is that all of these
players are captains of their team’s
studying stem in college and playing
some sort of sport okay so the thing is
that this is not your typical
stereotypical or this is not your
stereotypical group of people who are
doing stuff so the big thing that I want
to leave you with is that sports that
has become a driver of social change if
you look at the places that athletes
have taken a stand
you have you have crisp sorry you have
LeBron James
cp3 Melo and Dwyane Wade sorry Dwyane
Wade make that powerful stand for social
justice at the ESPYs you have Colin
Kaepernick doing excellent work in the
community and the knee of LeBron James
doing marketing campaigns based on
equality okay the big thing is that
right now we can actually tap into these
athletes thirst for being advocates for
social justice and we can use it to
improve STEM education so the big thing
is that stem is everywhere all right
it’s in political campaigns it’s in
hospitals it’s in sports and it’s in all
those other things so the thing is that
what we need to do as stem professionals
is we need to find a group of kids that
we share interest with
and show them how they can use stem to
improve what they love to do alright
thank you
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