Review by Galen McQuillen, Common Sense Education | Updated January 2016
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EA Sports Madden NFL: Football by the Numbers

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"Educational" football site is basically an interactive advertisement

Subjects & skills
Subjects
  • Math
  • Science
Skills
  • Critical Thinking
Grades This grade range is a recommendation by Common Sense Education and not the developer/publisher.
7–11
Common Sense says (See details)
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Not yet reviewed
Price:  Free Free
Platforms:  Website

Take a look inside

5 images
An easy-to-navigate front page provides all the links you'll need to use this tool in the classroom.
Pop-ups define football vocabulary terms (but not for math or science words).
A few diagrams make simplified connections between math and football.
With interactive learning tools, students can use trial and error or careful application of text to make football plays.
Students' inputs then create a rendered video showing whether their calculations result in a successful play.

Pros: Could rope kids who are ardent football fans into caring about a few math concepts or answer the "When am I ever gonna use this?" question.

Cons: Math content is incredibly weak with no depth, the site is littered with references to the video game, and there's no way to save progress.

Bottom Line: This isn't worth your time. If you want to bring football into math class, head out to the field with your students and toss a few balls around.

How Can I Teach with This Tool?

There aren't a whole lot of situations where EA Sports Madden NFL: Football by the Numbers would work better than going outside with your giant protractor and some footballs to play catch for awhile. Alternatively, you can visit football practice with some data loggers or measuring tapes and calculate force in person. 

If you absolutely must have a football-themed math class (Green Bay, looking at you) and otherwise can't get outside, you might use this tool instead. Only use it as a very shallow introduction to the concepts, however, or as a way to talk about how difficult mathematical modeling of real-world events can be. Discussing the flaws on this site would be a very fruitful learning experience, but exposing kids to so much branded content might be too high of a price. On the other hand, it just might be perfect for that one student who can't stop playing Madden NFL long enough to do a homework assignment. 

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Standards:

EA Sports Madden NFL: Football by the Numbers is an interactive website experience that uses the concepts and the language of American football, the players and teams of the National Football League, and footage from EA Sports' Madden NFL video game franchise to introduce and practice some math and physics concepts. Students read through content about the rules of the game, the history of the conferences, and details of play formations before learning about how angle, velocity, force, and probability are important concepts in the sport. 

After learning these concepts by reading text (with pop-up definitions of various football vocabulary words), students use interactive sliders to change angles and velocities or adjust force and then watch simulated football footage rendered using Madden NFL's video game engine to see if their inputs were correct.

It's very difficult to recommend EA Sports Madden NFL: Football by the Numbers as a learning tool. The four math and science concepts covered (angle, velocity, probability, and force) are discussed in very shallow terms, with little specificity and with tenuous links between the content and the game of football. For example, defensive players aren't using F=kg*m/s² to calculate the necessary force to tackle a player on the fly, so making students do so is the kind of disingenuous link between school and real life that totally turns students off and seldom results in deep learning.

The site does go into great detail about plenty of football topics, so students can expect to learn tons about the NFL and, by extension, EA's video game version of the league. This just amplifies the feeling that students are playing through a big advertisement, not any kind of learning experience.

Overall Rating
Engagement Is the product stimulating, entertaining, and engrossing? Will kids want to return?

Might be engaging to kids who are football fans, but won't keep them interested for long. Using actual video game footage will initially seem like fun.

Pedagogy Is learning content seamlessly baked-in, and do kids build conceptual understanding? Is the product adaptable and empowering? Will skills transfer?

Students experiment with trial and error to determine actions on the field, but the actual math content is too weak to be meaningful. 

Support Does the product take into account learners of varying abilities, skill levels, and learning styles? Does it address both struggling and advanced students?

Students do not receive helpful feedback for wrong answers, and support for teachers is missing beyond a quick how-to guide.

Common Sense Reviewer
Galen McQuillen Researcher
About our ratings and privacy evaluation.

Key Standards Supported

Modeling With Geometry

  • HSG.MG.1

    Use geometric shapes, their measures, and their properties to describe objects (e.g., modeling a tree trunk or a human torso as a cylinder).

Number And Operations In Base Ten

  • 5.NBT.5

    Fluently multiply multi-digit whole numbers using the standard algorithm.

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Key Standards Supported

Motion and Stability: Forces and Interactions

  • HS-PS2-1

    Analyze data to support the claim that Newton’s second law of motion describes the mathematical relationship among the net force on a macroscopic object, its mass, and its acceleration.

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