Mrs. Burns teaches the Mathematical Modeling class, which is more open-ended than a traditional math class. We work on modeling real world situations and applying the mathematical concepts we already know to solve more complex problems. We also participate in several math competitions throughout the year, such as HiMCM and MTFC, which are both modeling competitions, and NEML. Participation in other math competitions is encouraged by Mrs. Burns throughout the year.

Modeling The Future Challenge (a.k.a MTFC) is a long-term actuarial mathematical modeling challenge, hence focusing on data analysis and risk management. The class of 2025 (my class) is the first one to have done it at Mass Academy, and Mrs. Burns considers it an “experiment” for now. We were able to choose our groups for this challenge, as well as our team name. My group is “Actuary the Best” (you can guess why we decided to call ourselves that). For this challenge, we are first given practice material to get familiar with the actuarial process. Then, we get to move on and work on our own topic as well as another one in parallel for the first phase of the project, which focuses on proposing a prompt, collecting data for the prompt, analyzing that data, as well as possible risk mitigation strategies that could be developed to help solve the problem.

After this, selected teams get to advance to the project phase. For the project phase, teams get the help of an advisor who helps them analyze their problem and suggest possible risk mitigation strategies.

My team chose to work on “Skyward Bound: Risk Analysis of Overbooking Practices in Commercial Aviation”, or basically on analyzing the risk airlines take by overbooking flights, and then having to compensate passengers who are bumped off their flight, and then mitigating that risk. We have currently just started the project phase, and we have a meeting with our advisor on January 16th. Our responses to the first phase (Scenario Phase), and a more detailed explanation about my team’s topic can be found on this page.

This Problem Of the Week (a.k.a POW) was about developing a method for finding out the day of the week of a date between 1901 and 2100. Each group was given the calendar from a different month, and based on that, the development of the method began. My group decided to find the day of the week on December 31st 1900. From there, we would get the number of days between December 31st 1900 and the date that was given, and calculate the number of leap years

This problem was not just like another problem given in math class. It was fun and gave us the opportunity to enjoy something else for a week. Everyone was excited and tested each other's solutions with their own birthdays or random dates. The week really got so much more joy and excitement thanks to this problem. We also got to learn plenty of random things about the calendar, days of the week, and names.