The Math Modeling course at Mass Academy is unlike any other high school math in so many ways. The class is based on understanding concepts and being able to apply critical thinking to problems we might not have encountered before. The focus is really on our ability to work through problems and our ability to go about solving new problems logically rather than just memorization. Collaboration is heavily encouraged as we work through extremely difficult, new topics with our tables and learn to present our strategies to our class, improving our abilities to communicate our thought processes as well.
The High School Mathematical Contest in Modeling is a 36-hour math competition we all competed in with groups of 4 this past November. We received two extremely open ending modeling problems and after choosing our favorite, we got to work on understanding all the complicated factors that played into how we might go about getting a solution. We wrote a large CS model with JAVA and a 25-page paper outlining the research, process, and results of our project.
Mathematica is a coding software that allows you to program equations and logic to output solutions for your modeling. For this program, we were trying to manually find and graph a line of best fit for a given data set. This code takes the data, analyzes the medians of each section of the data, and graphs a weighted line through those median points.