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The Physics of Baseball: The Next Generation Science Standards and America's Greatest Pastime

Learning science in the context of real-life situations has long been established in science education research. For students who take an interest and/or actively engage in sports and athletics, learning science often becomes more meaningful when applied to specific sports, games, and related activities. While many curricula, lessons, and activities have been developed that relate science concepts to specific sports, little work has been done to examine the relationship between specific science content standards, as outlined in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks (MCF) for Science, Technology, and Engineering (STE), and specific aspects of a variety of sports. This project examines a select number of those standards within the physical sciences with regard to specific aspects of the sport of baseball. Topics include the conservation of energy and energy transfer, forces and motion, wave properties, and information technologies. The standards, specific physics concepts, and corresponding phenomena and examples from baseball are provided, along with a video recording illustrating some of those concepts.

Luke Mathewson '23  
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