On March 5, OHS students competed in the MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge. The nationwide math contest accepted over 3,500 students this year, and Oakwood students worked in the engineering lab while tackling the problem.

Teammates Jack Campbell (11), Rohan Haack (11), Charli Kulka (12), Wright Chen (11) and Alex Devgan (11) worked together on the real-world math challenge provided. The challenge required them to use communication and discrete mathematics, which involved graph and logic statements, to create a written report of their solution. 

“We looked through previous years’ questions, combed through the rubric, looked through winning papers and videos on what math modeling is,” Kulka said. 

The 2023 problem has not been disclosed to the public at this time, but Kulka reports that it was “pretty interesting and something that I didn’t previously know a lot about.”

Last year’s problem involved creating a model estimating the percentage of remote workers in a specific American city. Other components of the questions were models showing whether a remote worker would choose or be allowed to work from home and predicting the number of remote workers in 2024 and 2027.

“One of the goals of the challenge is to expose students to true mathematical modeling, which involves making assumptions, identifying variables, running the numbers based on these assumptions and variables, analyzing the data and fine-tuning the model as needed,” Ian Callon, adviser to the team, said.

Winners have also not been announced. If the OHS team places first, they will present their solution in New York, as well as split $20,000 in scholarship money.

“For me, it [the most fun part of the competition] was arguing over the best method and equation with my teammates,” Kulka shared. “We all had very different ideas for how to solve each problem… We would yell and say ours was the best until the other was convinced. It was really funny to me.”

Teams advancing to finals will be notified on March 29. Registration for next year’s competition is not currently open, but ends in February 2024. For more information, visit https://m3challenge.siam.org.