2014 HiMCM commentary

2014 HiMCM commentary

 

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摘要如下：

 

Contest Director’s Article

 

William P. Fox
Department of Defense Analysis Naval Postgraduate School Monterey, CA 93943 wpfox@nps.edu

We should all celebrate since the High School Mathematical Contest in Modeling (HiMCM) completed its seventeenth contest year. It is and continues to be a fantastic endeavor for students, advisors, schools, and judges. We have had schools ask for speakers to come in and discuss the modeling process so that their teams can improve and compete. We hope this trend continues. The mathematical modeling ability of students and their advisors is very evident in the professional submissions and work being done. The contest is still moving ahead, growing with a positive first derivative, and consistent with our positive experiences from previous HiMCM contests. We hope that this contest growth continues. Figure 1 is a plot of the growth over time. The trend over the last few years has been an exponential increase.

 

Figure 1: Number of HiMCM teams vs. contest year from 2009-2014
This year the contest had 705 teams and 671 total submissions. This represents an increase of about 17.22% over last year. We had 360 U.S. teams and 345 foreign teams, representing 10.4% and 26.8% growth, respectively. In the United States, these teams represented 79 schools and 24 states. China represented about 93% of the foreign entries. This year we had 2,689 students compete in the contest. This represents an increase of 17.37%. Of the 2,689 students, 1,001 or about 37.2% were female students. Since the beginning we have had 19,822 total participants, of which 7,231 or 36.47% have been female. We are proud of the number of female students that HiMCM attracts. We feel this is remarkable, and we hope that all competing students, male and female, continue on to some STEM education.

The teams accomplished the vision of our founders by providing unique and creative mathematical solutions to complex open-ended real-world problems. This year the students had a choice of two problems both of which represent “real-world issues.” (See the Judges’ Commen- tary that follows for the problem statements.)

Commendation:

 

All students and advisors are congratulated for their varied and creative mathematical efforts. Of the 705 registered teams, 671 submitted solutions, which is a 95.17% completion rate. All teams are encouraged to submit their solutions because it is in doing the contest that learning and awards are achieved. These 671 were broken down as follows: 361 doing problem A and 310 doing Problem B. The thirty-six continuous hours to work on the problem provided for quality papers; teams are commended for the overall quality of their work. Judges frequently comment about the amount of material students put together within the 36 hours. It is amazing.

Teams again proved to the judges that they had “fun” with their chosen problems, demonstrating research initiative and creativity in their solutions. This year’s effort was again a success!

Judging: We ran three regional judging sites in December 2014. The regional sites were:
• Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA
• Francis Marion University in Florence, SC
• Carroll College in Helena, MN.

Each site judged papers for problems A and B. The papers judged at each regional site may or may not have been from their respective region. Papers were judged as Finalist, Meritorious, Honorable Mention, and Successful Participant. All finalist papers from the Regional competitions were sent to the National Judging in San Antonio, Texas. This year’s national judging consisted of ten judges from both academia (high school and college) and industry. They judged the papers and chose the “best of the best” as National Outstanding. We usually discuss between 8-12 papers in the final round so all these papers were awarded either “National Finalist” or “National Outstanding”. This year there were 19 papers in the final discussions. Nine were deemed National Outstanding and ten National Finalist. These were the “best of the best.” The National Judges commended the regional judges for their efforts and found the results were very consistent. We feel that this regional structure provides a good structure for the future as the contest grows.