On March 1st, two upper school student groups participated in the Mathworks Math Modeling Challenge (M3C), a fourteen-hour modeling competition. Hundreds of teams across the U.S. and U.K. participated in this year’s competition for a top spot and a portion of the $100,000 available in scholarships. The first group comprised Fifth Formers Devin Carpenter, Finn Kelly, Conor McDonald, Ian Rosenzweig, and Nicholas Lu, and the other consisted of Sixth Formers Ethan Lee, Nolan McCloskey, Reilly Pryma, Justin Fan, and Arsh Aggarwal.
In this year’s challenge, groups of students worked to create models using data from Albuquerque and Seattle to predict the housing supply and homelessness rates ten, twenty, and fifty years from now. Then, they wrote recommendations on how to alleviate these problems using their data models.
Both groups faced difficulties, not just in finding a model, but also in managing their time well.
“It was very hard to manage our time, especially given that the first question about housing supply is the most difficult; we spent the majority of our time on it but came out with our most complex solution,” Pryma said.
The Sixth Form group accounted for data like labor prices, material prices, and land prices, which added difficulty but yielded a thorough response.
Both student groups used tools like Desmos and skills learned in math classes to find a model for both the housing supply and homelessness rate questions.
In the end, information accumulated throughout the day was compiled into one formal paper, including their solution to the problem.
“The last question was very vague and abstract which made it interesting to answer,” Pryma said. “We had to tweak some variables [e.g. lumber industry data and zoning policies] used earlier in order to answer this question.”
The groups spent fourteen hours together, strengthening their friendships.
“It was a really long day but really fun overall. I became close friends with all the guys on my team and also learned a lot of skills from it,” Kelly said. “I think that having the skill to model math with numbers in order to predict what the future may hold is important and was also a fun idea to work with.”
Both groups performed strongly and are awaiting their results, which will be released in the coming weeks.
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