The course extends beyond the typical high school math syllabus by involving students in open-ended problem solving, computer simulations, and teamwork. Students apply mathematical principles to represent real-world scenarios using algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and statistics.
The Modeling the Future Challenge presents a real-world contest designed for high school students that integrates math modeling, data analysis, and risk management into an engaging challenge. Participants are tasked with conducting their own research project, utilizing real-world data to analyze risks and provide recommendations to companies, industry groups, governments, or organizations. Our team decided to focus on mental health insurance, particularly depression and its associated economical impacts.
In this math modeling scenario, we created a model to distribute teachers "fairly" among the departments of a school. The definition of "fair" was left to the students to decide, and we settled on using student to faculty ratios to determine where teachers would need to be assigned. We also accounted for student drop-out rates and change in classes between grades. The slides here were a supplement for our in-class presentation of our solution.