March Madness Element Bracket

March Madness isn't just for basketball fans! With a little twist, Chemistry teachers can bring the excitement of this tournament into their classrooms. In this blog post, I'll outline our annual engaging March Madness-inspired project where students create persuasive presentations on the deadliest chemical elements. With NCAA Final Four games coming up next weekend, it is not too late to join the fun!

The Setup

Here's how our school runs the Element Bracket. It has turned out to be an annual tradition. March is full of scheduling challenges at our school from state testing prep, spring break, switching of terms, and inservice. This enrichment assignment has been used as a quick way to bring some fun to the class period, review content, and fill in scheduling gaps. Feel free to modify to fit your needs and situation:

element_trophy.jpg

Figure 1: Element Trophy

1. Bracket Creation: I used plexkits to create a bracket. I included a pdf of the bracket I use in the supporting information. The Element Bracket is organized by four areas of the periodic table: main group, transition metals, nonmetals, and actinides/lathinides. This is similar to the March Madness Basketball brackets organized with an East, South, West, and Midwest section of the bracket. Assign elements to your students. I teach four sections of all-inclusive Chemistry. This allows me to assign students in each class an element in one of the areas of the periodic table. For example, my 4th hour class was the Nonmetal section this year. Students in that class selected from the nonmetals only. There are 16 nonmetal elements in the bracket so some students are paired up to complete the task. My 5th hour class was the Transitional Metals section and were only assigned elements from that area of the periodic table. By separating classes into four areas of the bracket or periodic table, it was easier to have head-to-head presentation battles in class until the Final Four, where each class sent one element to battle the winners from the other classes and areas of the periodic table. The winner of the March Madness Element Bracket gets to sign and date the coveted March Madness trophy made out of test tubes and pipettes (see figure 1).   

2. Research and Preparation: Students create a short one-minute presentation for their element. The goal is to give two good reasons why their element is more lethal or dangerous than other elements on the periodic table using content knowledge they have learned so far in Chemistry class (density, bonding properties, electronegativity, reactivity, half-lives, etc.). I have found that students just copy and paste long paragraphs to their slides without really reading the information. Adding a requirement of a font size of 32 helped mitigate this and promote summarizing. I have found the battles work best if you give 15 minutes of work time to create the slides right before the battles begin. Unprepared students really throw off the flow of the battles. During the 20 minute work time, I circulate and focus on the students who need the most help with researching online. It is a pretty quick research task so most students can pull together a Google slide in about 10 minutes or so. I do assign this task a day or two before the presentations to give students who would like extra time to prepare, the opportunity to do so outside of class. Some students really get into this and appreciate the extra time to let the creative juices flow and to do more extensive research. I have included a sample rubric in the supporting information. 

3. Presentation Battles: For each battle, students present their Google slideshow to the class and give a one-minute argument about why their element is the most lethal. They get the opportunity to provide a rebuttal or final statement after their opponent's presentation. After each battle, students vote and the winners move on to the next round. Depending on the schedule, I might do one battle at the end of a class period over multiple days or do all the battles at once. Eventually each class selects one winner to go to the Final Four. I copy the presentations of the Final Four elements into one shared Google slideshow. I present the Final Four presentation on behalf of the winners to all my classes so they can vote. Eventually, we have our final winner of the bracket. The winner gets pictured with a homemade trophy made out of test tubes, cardboard, pipe cleaners and pipettes. They also get to sign their name and date to one of the test tubes on the trophy for future years to admire. Being able to sign the trophy is a motivator for some students!

The Learning Opportunities

This activity offers numerous benefits:

1. Critical Thinking: Students must critically evaluate the properties and characteristics of their assigned element to construct persuasive arguments. This encourages deep understanding and analytical thinking.

2. Research Skills: Researching the lethality of chemical elements requires students to sift through various sources, honing their research skills and information literacy.

3. Communication Skills: Presenting their findings to their peers hones students' communication skills, including public speaking and the ability to convey complex information clearly and persuasively.

4. Content Reinforcement: Depending on what your chemistry classes are studying in March, students can reinforce their understanding of fundamental concepts such as density, reactivity, atomic structure, reactions, periodic trends, bonding, etc. Many students learn new chemistry content while researching and listening to presentations in addition to real life applications to content they have already learned.

5. Engagement and Fun: By framing the activity within the context of a tournament, students are naturally more engaged and invested in the learning process. It injects an element of fun into the classroom while still focusing on educational objectives.

Our school has made the March Madness Element Championship an annual tradition because students have so much fun battling other students through friendly trash talking and clever rebuttals. It is a great enrichment activity when presented with scheduling challenges due to the state testing, end of term, spring break, etc. It helps reinforce chemistry concepts and show students additional ways chemistry is used in the real world.