2011 HiMCM commentary

2011 HiMCM commentary

 

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Contest Director's Article

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

It is hard to believe that the High School Mathematical Contest in Modeling (HiMCM) completed its fourteenth year. It is and continues to be a fantastic endeavor. The mathematical and 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. The plot of the growth over time is shown in Figure 1. The current trend is an exponential increase.

This year the contest had 450 teams consisting of 1721 students from 24 states and 4 foreign countries. We had 266 U.S. teams and 169 foreign teams, representing 35% and 58% growth, respectively. In the United States these teams represented 49 schools. China represented about 64% of the foreign entries. Of the 1721 students, almost 35% were female students. The breakdown was 608 female, 1023 male students, and 90 unspecified genders. Since the beginning we have had 12,731 total participants, of which 36% have been female. This year, we again charged a registration fee of $75 per team. 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 450 registered teams, 435 submitted solutions. These were broken down as 222 doing problem A and 213 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.
Many teams had female members. There were 608 female participants on the 435 teams. There were 1721 total participants, so females made up over 35.3% of the total participation, showing that this competition is for both genders. This percent is almost triple the percent of woman in many other math competitions.

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 2011. 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 Regional Outstanding, Meritorious, Honorable Mention, and Successful Participant. All finalist papers from the Regional competition including all Outstanding awards were sent to the National Judging in Boston. For example, eight papers may be discussed at a Regional Final and only four selected as Regional Outstanding but all eight papers are judged for the National Outstanding. Papers receive the higher of the two awards. The national judging chooses the "best of the best" as National Outstanding. 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.