In Math class, Mr. Regele covers a variety of content throughout the year. We do problem sets from Phillips Exeter Academy and do "exchanges of knowledge" to demonstrate what we have learned. Every now and then, we watch James Grimes videos that relate to other material we are learning such as Pasacal's Triangle, Fibonacci numbers, and Factorials. At the beginning of the year, we also do some math modeling on a variety of problems that are more like the real world.
One of the things we did in preparation for a math competition called High School Mathematical Contest in Modeling (HiMCM) was to do a mock trial-run on the Euler School problem. For this, we were divided into groups and told to follow math modeling principles to come up with a solution with our groups and then create a presentation detailing what we did. See my groups presentation below with the problem and our solution among other things.
HiMCM is an international competition that is available to all high school and secondary level students. Typically, two problems are given at a specified start time and from there you have 11 days to work on either one. At MAMS, students are given 36 hours during school days to work on the problem so that it does not interfere too much with other school work. Most groups typically complete the problem and their write-up within this time frame. For the 2020 problem, there were two problems as well. The problem my group chose was to figure out what the best summer job for high schoolers would be for the summer of 2021. We chose this problem because we thought that solutions would be more subjective and thus allow for more creativity. Overall, our approach to the problem was to discuss factors that we thought would be important and ultimately use decision matrices, which we had learned about in STEM class, in an equation form to model what we thought would be the ideal solution. Finding a solution to the problem and then creating a final write-up of the paper within a 36 hour time frame was bit exhausting, but at the same time, it felt good to have a finished product at the end. The PDF details my group's write-up to the problem.