Student scored with love of math

When BOCES teacher Ellen Kessler Dubinsky invited her ninth grade students to enter the Al Kalfus Long Island Math Fair at Hofstra University, she advised them to consider a subject they like and relating that subject to math. For Sean Quane of Baldwin, that meant soccer.

Sean wanted to explore how math “affects soccer playing, how it affects angles,” he said.

“The thought of distance and what angle to kick may help me when I play soccer,” he said.

Dubinsky said, “I told them math is in everything. I told the students to pick a subject, anything you like, and go with it. The projects are fabulous.”

For example, one girl studied math and ice-skating, she said, while another student looked at math and Rubik’s cube.

Sean, a freshman at Baldwin High School and a veteran of the Baldwin Eagles soccer club, studied two particular situations: The penalty kick and the free kick.

In the first case, the penalty kick, he wanted to know at what angle a kicker would have to kick a soccer ball to hit a certain spot, and how far the goalie would have to dive to save ball.

In the second instance, Sean looked a free kick, where a team sets up a wall, about 10 yards from the ball, in an effort to block off an area so a goalie doesn’t have a big distance to cover.

Sean’s question: How much area the team would have to block to protect the goalie, and at what angle would a kicker have to kick the ball to score.

On the penalty kick, he learned that a kicker would have to kick the ball 18 degrees to hit the pole. Also, a goalie who dives in a path that is perpendicular to the ball minimizes the distance by 95 percent.

For the free kick, Sean, 15, set up a situation in which some players were 30 yards out with other players 10 yards away from the wall, creating a 4-foot-wide wall. Sean calculated that a kicker kicking the ball around the wall must kick at 5- or 6-degree angle.

Sean, the son of Carmel and Ned Quane, said the project helped him learn how to relate math to his everyday life. “It might give me an idea of how I kick it [the ball]. Mainly, it helps the goalie. If the goalie on penalty dives forward instead of straight, it would give him a chance to save the ball.”

Sean, who has a brother and a sister, said math is his favorite subject. “It’s interesting, seeing how you can solve a problem, and [how it affects] different aspects of what you do, especially science.”

Although Sean didn’t make it to the finals in the competition last weekend, Dubinsky noted that this was Sean’s first time in such a contest.

“He’s never been exposed to a math fair before,” she said. “We find the ninth-graders are new to this.”

In all, 44 students from the BOCES STEM program — that is, science, technology, engineering and math — created projects to enter in the fair. All of the subjects were chosen by the kids.

“This was a volunteer project,” Dubinsky said. “Then we [the faculty] had to judge the projects, and we picked 12 kids” to enter the fair.

“I think it [Sean’s project] was interesting,” Dubinsky said. “He presented it with PowerPoint. A very good PowerPoint with a lot of pictures.”

Among the criteria at the fair was presentation of a subject, she said. “He was good,” Dubinsky said before the fair. “He knew his subject.”

“It’s a learning experience to learn to help present [give presentations] in the future,” Sean said, before the competition.

“When you research something you’re interested in, it makes it better,” Dubinsky said. “He knows his soccer so he knows what he’s talking about.”