Math Modeling is taught by Mrs. Burns, in this class students take a new approach to math using their math knowledge to model real-life situations. Within the class, a heavy emphasis is placed on collaboration and group work. In class we have worked on multiple modeling problems and situations as well as some math problem sets to help discover new math concepts.
One of the problems we worked on was a problem in which our goal was to develop a system for finding out what day of the week someone was born given their birth date. We were assigned groups for this assignment and we worked together to develop an algorithm to achieve our goal. This problem ended up being more challenging than I initially expected because going back and accounting for leap years was a little tricky but we had got our solution. Here you can see our document detailing our algorithm and process as well as some Java code we wrote to execute our algorithm.
The Modeling the Future Challenge is a competition we have been working on in our class from early in the year. This is a competition where students are asked to develop their own mathematical model within a new industry that might change the future. This is highly involved in the actuarial process and allowed us to get experience with real-world data analysis. I have been working on this competition together with a few group members and we have learned so much together.