The five BPHS participants in the M3 Challenge are, from left, Olivia Wallin-Eddy, Madison Fagant, Christina Lin, Julie Capito and Kyler Mangulis (not pictured).
Fourteen hours might seem like a long time to spend on one math problem, but five Broadalbin-Perth High School students say they likely will need every scrap of the allotted time to solve the real-world problem their team will face in the upcoming national M3 Challenge.
Sponsored by The Moody’s Foundation and organized by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Moody’s Mega Math (M3) Challenge is a free Internet-based, applied math competition for junior and senior high school students. The contest provides an opportunity for students across the nation to work in teams to come up with their own solutions to a realistic problem within a 14-hour time frame.
The five BPHS participants, Julie Capito, Olivia Wallin-Eddy, Christina Lin, Madison Fagant and Kyler Mangulis, are all juniors in Billy Eipp’s pre-calculus class and are all self-professed “math people.”
They decided to form a team for the M3 Challenge “kind of on a whim,” Wallin-Eddy said.
The five of them sit in the front row of the class, where Eipp had hung a poster advertising the online contest.
“We wanted to see how good at math we really are,” Lin said.
“We thought, ‘Let’s challenge ourselves,’ ” Capito said.
Previous years’ challenge questions have included quantifying issues such as how to make school lunches affordable, nutritious, and delicious; national recycling strategies; selecting investment plans and maximizing net profit of the stock market; and whether higher education is “worth it.”
According to contest organizers, the strict time constraint of the competition mimics many professional environments and shows students how critical time management skills are when solving real-world problems, specifically in STEM professions.
This year’s M3 Challenge weekend is Feb. 27-28. Ahead of the competition, the B-P team members say they have been meeting to organize themselves and figure out what resources they need for that day.
Top teams have the opportunity to win part of $150,000 in scholarships, but the BPHS students said the possibility of winning money wasn’t what drew them to the contest.
“We’re really doing it for the satisfaction,” Fagant said. “We’ll be really happy to finish a math project like this.”