2012 HiMCM commentary

2012 HiMCM commentary

 

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摘要如下：

 

HiMCM 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 fifteenth year. It is and continues to be a fantastic endeavor for students, advisors, schools, and judges. We have even had schools ask for speakers to come in and discuss the modeling process so that their teams can improve and compete. 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.

 

This year the contest had 552 teams. This represents an increase of about 23% over last year. We had 2111 students from 23 states representing 58 schools and 5 foreign countries. We had 301 U.S. teams and 251 foreign teams, representing 13% and 49% growth, respectively. In the United States, these teams represented 58 schools. China represented about 93% of the foreign entries. Of the 2111 students, 777 or almost 37% were female students. The breakdown was 777 female, 1315 male students, and 19 unspecified genders. Since the beginning we have had 14,842 total participants, of which 36.34% have been female. We feel this is remarkable and that we hope they all 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 realworld issues.

Commendation: All students and advisors are congratulated for their varied and creative mathematical efforts. Of the 552 registered teams, 518 submitted solutions. These were broken down as follows: 213 doing problem A and 205 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.

 

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 a success!

Judging:

 

We ran three regional sites in December 2012. 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 San Diego. The 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.