O’Neal Students Compete in COMAP

O’Neal Upper School students were given the opportunity to participate in an intense international math modeling competition held November 8th – 10th.
The Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (COMAP) is funded by corporations to host this competition among high school students around the world. Being presented two real-life problems, students were asked to pick one and find the best possible way to resolve it. Not typical math problems, these are issues that companies face on a day to day basis and cannot be fully obtained in a classroom. The competition is a 36-consecutive hour event. Teams collectively write their methodology of solving the problem, and submit the paper to the judges at COMAP. Once all entries are received, teams are ranked among the other participating schools around the world. In February 2015, awards will be issued to individual teams ranging from Successful Participant, Honorable Mention, Meritorious, Finalist, and Outstanding. Outstanding winners could be published in COMAP’s magazine Consortium.

“The cool thing about this competition is that there are no correct answers, just plausible solutions,” remarks faculty advisor Elizabeth Ciskowski. “Everyone participating in this worldwide event has a different background in which they are coming from.”

O’Neal had three teams participating in the competition. Team 1 was seniors Rick Catania, Blake Martin, Hunter Massey and Minghua Xie. Team 2 was senior Philip Casey, sophomore Margaux Winter and sophomore Kate Peters. Team 3 was sophomore Bridge Hu, junior Emily Mackillop, sophomore Lu Yang and junior Will Schirmer.

The two problems were: 1. How to control the outbreak of Ebola on an island in Indonesia by using a math model to allocate scarce resources. 2. Use a math model to show how to increase efficiency in travel for commuters to exit train stations.

COMAP, the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications, is an award-winning non-profit organization. Its mission is to improve mathematics education for students of all ages around the world. Since 1980, COMAP has worked with teachers, students, and business people to create learning environments where mathematics is used to investigate and model real issues in our world. For more information about COMAP, go to: www.comap.com.
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