2013 HiMCM commentary

2013 HiMCM commentary

 

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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 sixteenth 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 faculty 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.

This year the contest had 598 teams and 581 total submissions. This represents an increase of about 7.5% over last year. We had 326 U.S. teams and 272 foreign teams, representing 11.1% and 6.9% growth, respectively. In the United States, these teams represented 68 schools and 26 states. China represented about 93% of the foreign entries. Of the 2291 students, 835 or almost 36.4% were female students. The breakdown was 835 female, 1448 male students, and 8 unspecified. Since the beginning we have had 17,133 total participants, of which 6,230 or 36.36% have been female. We are proud of the number of female students that HiMCM attracts. We feel this is remarkable and that 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 rep
resent “real-world issues.” (See the Judges’ Commentary that follows for the problem statements.)

Commendation:

All students and advisors are congratulated for their varied and creative mathematical efforts. Of the 598 registered teams, 581 submitted solutions, which is a 97.2% completion rate. These were broken down as follows: 383 doing problem A and 198 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 2013. 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 competition were sent to the National Judging in Baltimore. This year’s national judging, consisting of eight judges from academia (high school and college) and industry, chose the “best of the best“ as National Outstanding. We usually discuss between 8-10 papers in the final round so all these papers were awarded “National Finalist.” 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.

National Outstanding Teams Shanghai Experimental School, Shanghai, China Hong Kong International School, Hong Kong University High School, Irvine, CA Shanghai Foreign Language School, Shanghai, China Shanghai High School International Division Shanghai, China North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Durham, NC Eastside High School, Gainsville, FL American Heritage School, Plantation, Coral Springs, FL