5 Ways to Spark Engagement in Math Class With the Iditarod Race

Are you interested in providing your middle school students with an interdisciplinary unit that is fun, covers your math standards, and actively involves students in their learning? It sounds like a win-win situation, right? If your answer is yes, I've got just the project for you! For the past three years, our sixth grade team has taught a five-week unit about the Iditarod Race. No, the race doesn't actually take five weeks to complete, but we begin our unit before the race starts to get students informed and excited for the actual start of the race.

Each of us (that is Math, Language Arts, Social Studies, and Science teachers) find ways to incorporate the Iditarod into lessons and activities. I want to share with you what takes place in my math class and hopefully ignite a spark for other teachers to try this unit too.

1. Race to Nome

This project was a new addition to our unit this year. My good friend and colleague, Laura Gilbert, is an amazing artist, so she made the map pictured below. Hand drawn on paper and attached to my magnetic whiteboard, it displays a map of the mushers' journey to Nome, Alaska. Laura actually made two maps, one for her classroom as well. Due to the fact that we are working with about 80 students, we thought it might get a little crowded to have all the students represented on just one map.

Race to Nome Map created by Laura Gilbert

Each student was given their own sled-dog magnet. This was a picture of a dog printed in color, laminated, cut out, and attached to a magnet. Students wrote their names on a sticky label on the front and we are hoping these will peel off and be able to reuse them next year. Here is a closer look at one of the dogs.

How do students earn miles as they race to Nome? The idea was that students needed to complete some short activities, usually reading a brief article and answering some questions, to earn miles. The more questions they completed and answered correctly, the closer they moved to their final destination. They needed to earn 4 miles to move from one checkpoint to the next, for a total of 100 miles to reach Nome. Students downloaded a document on their iPads, where they kept track of their answers. They used time during certain classes, study hall, or before/after school to regularly "check-in" to see their progress. I won't lie, this was a lot of work to keep track of, so we are investigating ways to make it easier for the future. I did eventually train the students who had already finished to check the answers of their classmates. Otherwise, I spent all of study hall checking students' answers.

What I really loved about this part of the project was that it was largely created by the students. In the two weeks leading up to the beginning of the race, we asked students to research the Iditarod in their technology class. They worked in small groups and were given the choice about what to focus their research on. We suggested topics such as mushers, the dogs, the history of the Iditarod, the equipment used by mushers, awards and prizes, etc. Then the students used the information gained to create an activity that other students could complete. Most students posted a link to an article and asked a related question. The map was a nice visual touch for students to watch their dog move towards the finish line.

2. Fantasy Iditarod Team

Another fun and new activity this year - the Fantasy Iditarod team. In the past we've had students choose one rookie musher and one veteran musher to follow during the race. We wanted to revamp this, because when your musher drops out of the race or gets scratched, it's just not that fun anymore. Students instead chose six racers, two had to be veterans of the race, two had to be rookies, and two had to be women mushers.

Every couple of days we had students fill out a Fantasy Iditarod worksheet, writing their mushers' names, their position in the race at the checkpoint, and points earned (see above). Points were awarded as follows:

We created a spreadsheet for students to use to find out each musher's time into each checkpoint. At first we tried using the Iditarod website, but it listed mushers in order of time leaving the checkpoint, not entering it.

As students submitted their Fantasy Iditarod worksheet, we checked for accuracy and entered the standings into a spreadsheet (can you tell we like spreadsheets)? Students loved checking the sixth grade website to see their standings.

3. Daily Math Problem

At the beginning of each week, I emailed students their Math Musher Log. They downloaded this into their Notability app so students could write on it, and we began each day by completing the daily problem. These could be focused on particular skills you want students to practice or review. This year I chose to focus certain week's problems on a particular topic. For instance, one week we completed problems each day that were about the cost of running a kennel.

Sometimes I added additional problems, like over the weekend or Spring Break. These were chances for students to earn some extra credit. If the problems were harder, I included some "hints" to help them get started in the right direction.

4. Men Vs. Women Pie Chart Poster

For a mini statistics project, we analyzed the percentage of men and women in the Iditarod race. We also wanted to see how this has changed over time, so we also determined the percentage of men and women from the Iditarod race 30 years ago.

In the past, I've had students gather this data on their own, by writing the name of each musher, their gender, and age (for another project). This proved to be very time-consuming and prone to student errors, especially when they would guess at some of the information. So, I made a spreadsheet.

This spreadsheet listed information about this year's race, so I did have students go to the Iditarod website and look at the race archives to gather the data for the race from 1985. Once we knew how many men and how many women were in the race for 1985 and 2015, we created a poster to share our data. Part of the criteria was for students to make 3 comments/observations - one about the raw numbers, one about the percentages, and a prediction for the race 30 years in the future. Here is the example I made to share with students.

Do you know what was really great about the Iditarod race from 30 years ago? Only 5 women were in the race, but it was won by a woman!

5. Statistics Project - Age of Mushers

We also completed a statistics project that covered most of the statistics standards for sixth grade by studying the age of the Iditarod mushers. Using the spreadsheet data above, we found the mean, median, mode, range, quartiles, and mean absolute deviation of the ages of the mushers. We used this data to create a dot plot, box plot, and a histogram. 

I had students use a calculator to find the sum of all the mushers' ages. There were 79 mushers! Believe me, they made many mistakes in adding all those numbers. But they kept on trying until they reached the magic number. Finally, I showed them how their Numbers spreadsheet will calculate all of these formulas for us, so we were able to check our work. They were pretty astonished at what can be done with a spreadsheet. I also taught students how to use the spreadsheet to create a Dot Plot and we used this website to create our Box Plot. 

Here is a student example of the Age of Mushers project. I notice the Dot Plot doesn't look exactly like what we created in class. Something must have changed in the conversion process, but this is a good example of what we accomplished.

Click here to see the student example above

I hope you've enjoyed reading about some of the Iditarod projects we completed and possibly found some inspiration for your own classroom!