Math Modeling is a challenging and engaging course that covers a variety of mathematical topics. The class is structured around collaboration and growth in general mathematical thinking and skills. This class is taught by Mr. Regele and is very unique due to the wide variety of student experience levels. The learning is very group focused and usually through in-class conversations or short student presentations of problems. Both the classwork and homework can be challenging at times, however strong collaboration helps me to understand concepts more easily. Maybe one of the hardest parts of the class is that we are rarely allowed to use calculators which helps the growth of more concept-based skills.
HiMCM is a 48-hour high school math competition where teams mathematically model real-world situations. Teams are made up of small groups of students who work together to come up with a solution to the dynamic questions. The questions require research as well as application of skills. Two options are available, and the groups can choose between them. My group consisted of Anh Tran, Maya Zheng, Donny Le, and me. We chose to the Storing the Sun problem which was, in summary, choosing the best solar batteries for an off-the-grid system. We chose this problem mainly because we were most comfortable with and decided that we would enjoy battery comparison over yearly data. We derived our solution through weighting of different features of batteries in order to rank them for different circumstances such as hot or cold regions. It was a fun experience because I got to work with some friends, but it was also very difficult because of high tensions with the limited timeframe.
The goal of this project was to learn how to manually graph a least squares line and a least squares residuals line. However, the problem itself was modeling cancer deaths per 100,000 residents for multiple countries that were exposed to radiation as well as an exposure index. This project was done on the software Mathematica which is commonly used for our mathematical modeling problems.