March Madness Math - What is the Probability of Picking a Perfect Bracket?

The end of the college basketball season comes, and March Madness takes over. Millions of people tackle the challenge of creating the perfect bracket by attempting to predict the winner of all 63 games in the tournament. How difficult can that be? (wink, wink)

This slide show first delivers a mini-lesson on how to calculate the total number of possible outcomes of an event. It then goes through the mathematical process of how to arrive at the fact that there are 9.2 quintillion possible brackets that could be created for the NCAA basketball tournament.

Given that mind-numbing number of brackets, it then demonstrates the futility of trying to fill out every possible bracket. And if a copy of every possible bracket somehow could be made, it goes through the process of calculating the dizzying height of that stack of papers.

Six scenarios with ridiculous odds are then presented that would actually be a lot easier to accomplish than filling out a perfect March Madness bracket.

The bottom line is that your students will come away with a new understanding of the incredible number of possibilities relating to the March Madness Basketball Tournament. Their minds will be expanded as they try to comprehend the astronomical odds against anyone picking a perfect bracket for the tournament.

The zip file includes the slide show in 2 formats: PowerPoint and PDF.

If you teach science or know someone who is looking for some online video labs, check out these Investigating Science Labs which are also available at my store:

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