Teaching Data Literacy and Sports Economic Fundamentals Using Fantasy Sports.

Teaching data literacy and sports economic fundamentals can be seen by students as unengaging when taught in the traditional lecture format. An activity using student participation in a fantasy league draft was used to actively engage students. This activity focused on learning the economic concepts of the Noll-Scully measure, Gini coefficient, Lorenz curve and the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI). Marginal product was used to evaluate player performance, and competitive balance were used to evaluate league performance. It also taught data literacy skills such as locating and entering data and using Excel functions to organize and clean data. Students ran regression models to proxy the concept of marginal product in evaluating relative performance and collected data to compare players' predicted point contribution. The activity can be refined for similar courses in data literacy and sports economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]