England Rugby

Delivery idea

Middle-higher ability Year 9 and 10 students produce a presentation about the team most likely to win either a single match or a pool.

How to do it

The teacher begins by asking:

• What makes a good winning team?
• Do the same skills apply to any team?
• How could we predict the probability of a team winning

Or

• Who is the best team?
• How are the IRB world rankings calculated?

Either the teacher or the students need to source raw data from games analyses, such as:

• No. (%) of line outs won
• No. (%) of scrums won
• No. (%) of tackles made/missed
• Conversion rate
• No. turnovers

Students work in small groups to interrogate the data and present which team they think will win, and why.

When/ where to use it

Students will need prior knowledge of how to:

• create hypotheses
• sort and pick out key data and decide what data to use
• use ICT to create graphs and presentations
• draw pie charts
• calculate means
• draw other comparative graphs
• plot scatter graphs and understand the correlation so they can compare multiple countries and see if there is a relationship between scrums won and line outs won.

Top tips

For the teacher

• Have data to hand, preferably electronically, so the students can use ICT in maths.
• Deliver a pre-lesson on how to find and calculate data.

For the students

• Delegate jobs. Play to your strengths: who is going to present; which statistics are you going to give to which person to analyse?
• Are there rugby players in the class who can be linked to each group to help with understanding?