When junior Helen Yang pulled out her phone to check for any last-minute emails on the night of her very first Prom, she did not expect to learn that her team had become one of six finalists in the MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge. She could hardly contain her excitement as she rushed to tell junior teammates Anik Banerji, David Qian, Jack Vu (senior) and Brandon Wu of the news.
The MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge, also known as the M3 Challenge, is a competition that allows juniors and seniors in high school to solve real-world problems.
“This year, the problems were about heat waves,” Wu said. “But in the past, we’ve seen problems such as homelessness in certain big cities or modeling the use of new technologies such as e-bikes.”
The M3 Challenge takes place over a weekend. After a team begins the competition, members have exactly fourteen hours to find and type up a solution to the three parts of the problem.
“I think a challenging part has to be staying on task during the fourteen hours because you can get distracted very easily,” Qian said.
Each school can have a maximum of two teams consisting of three to five students. The four juniors, Banerji, Qian, Wu and Yang, decided to form a team considering they have shared the same math class for years and have become good friends. Vu later joined the group as the fifth member.
A couple of weeks after submitting their solution, the group was enjoying their time at Prom when they received the news that they qualified as a finalist.
“I was surprised to hear that we got top six,” Qian said. “There are almost 800 other teams that competed.”
Banerji, Qian, Vu, Wu and Yang, along with other teams who qualified for the final round, were invited to New York City to give a fifteen-minute presentation of their solution.
To prepare for this part of the competition, the five students grouped together at Qian’s house to practice.
“We would meet at David’s house every Sunday and spend our whole mornings practicing,” Banerji said. “At first, we put together a slideshow and then later, wrote a script, running through that script over and over until it became like second nature to us.”
On April 27th, the team flew to New York. The day before their presentation, the students had several hours to explore the city and have fun.
“My favorite part of the competition was getting to go to New York and meeting other people from different states, and there were even students from England,” Yang said. “I also really enjoyed watching other teams’ presentations and seeing the different approaches they took to answering the problem.”
When it was finally their time to present, many team members found the most difficult part of the presentation to be answering the judges’ questions.
“They asked around four questions,” Vu said. “To be honest, they were more difficult than what we were anticipating, but we knew our paper very well and were able to do a good job.”
The group placed third in the M3 Challenge and thus received ten thousand dollars, which they split equally among themselves.
“Given our success and how we already understand how the competition works, it would be a great idea for us to do this competition again next year,” Wu said.
