The High School Mathematical Contest in Modeling (HiMCM) is an international contest for high school students to demonstrate and improve their analysis, problem solving, modeling, and writing skills. The contest offers a challenge for student teams to solve a real-world math problem, and to develop a mathematical model. My team consisted of me, Anya Kelley, Lily Pattinson, and Giang Pham. We chose the problem about modeling a bee’s population since a majority of us took AP Bio or were familiar with equations predicting population based on birth and death rates. We decided to use the data from a research paper about bee populations in North America as the constant for our model, and we found that our model was even able to accurately predict the population of a bee colony after disease and low food seasons. Overall, HiMCM was a super fun opportunity, and it was fun to see everyone at MAMS over the 48 hour period. Read the full paper here.
For this assignment, my group and I were given an abstract question determining what departments should receive new teachers, given a little bit about the school’s profile and patterns for student enrollment. This question was really challenging. but my group decided to look at student to teacher ratios to determine which departments had significantly higher student: teacher ratios given the number of new students in the school. We also set assumptions to say that each student had to take a math, English, and science courses every year throughout high school to make the problem a little easier. Eventually, we decided that there should be two new biology teachers, one new English teacher, one teacher who can teach both French and Spanish, one new math teacher, and lastly, two new social studies teachers. Click here for the full slideshow in a new tab.