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The High School Student Team I Coached for the SCUDEM VII Challenge Presented their Work at an Online Conference

Gregory Mayer / / outreach

Last weekend I attended a few talks at the SIMODE Expo online conference, one of which was a talk by the three students who I coached last fall for a mathematical modeling challenge. Congratulations again to Royce Arockiasamy, Henry Bui, and Adi Krish – their outstanding teamwork in the SCUDEM modeling challenge last fall led them to be offered with a chance to present their work at the SIMODE Expo last weekend.

Their talk was titled SCUDEM Outstanding Award Team: Humans Don’t Deserve the World — Modeling the Introduction of Humans to a Predator-Prey System. They summarized their work, how they prepared for the challenge, some of the feedback they received from judges, and some of what they learned and appreciated from having a chance to participate in the challenge.

The conference organizers posted a recording of their session on YouTube.

For a summary of what they presented, here is their conference abstract:

In the Fall of 2022, our team competed in SCUDEM VII hosted by SIMIODE, where we received the highest distinction – Outstanding Award. Our goal was to study humans’ effects on predator-prey populations when they populate an area. In this talk, we would like to go over how we prepared for and solved Problem C, present our equations and their derivations, explain our models, go over some of the feedback from the judges, and talk about how the SCUDEM challenge benefited us as students. See the Outstanding Team Video video posted on SIMIODE’s YouTube Channel.

The GT School of Math kindly helped pay for their registration.

Congratulations to Three GT Dual Enrolled High School Students who Won an Outstanding Award in an Annual International Mathematical Modeling Challenge

Gregory Mayer / / outreach

Congratulations to three GT students who worked together as a team last fall to participate in an annual mathematical modeling challenge: SIMIODE VII and obtained an Outstanding Award for their work. I was their coach, which meant that I helped them register and prepare for the challenge, but wasn’t allowed to help them during the official challenge period.

The Outstanding Award is the highest possible honor for this mathematical modeling challenge.

The three students were enrolled in a Dual Enrollment program and are taking undergraduate math courses at Georgia Tech.

The GT School of Math kindly supported their participation by paying for their registration.

What is SIMIODE?

SIMIODE is an international student team challenge in which teams of students select one of three mathematical modeling problems. Each team is tasked with producing a mathematical model and summarizing their model in a video that is no longer than ten minutes.

The three mathematical problems that students can select are in the general area of (A); Chemistry/Life Sciences; (B) Physics/Engineering; and (C) Social Sciences/Humanities.

This year the challenge problems were titled:

  • Problem A: Introducing Stress
  • Problem B: The Mechanics of Suction Feeding
  • Problem C: People Ruin Everything

Students prepare a ten-minute video and post it as “unlisted” in YouTube for judges to score and render constructive comments.

This year the challenge problems were released on 23 October 2022 and team videos were due and posted on 14 November 2022 while judging was completed by 11 December 2022.

Complete information on SCUDEM VII 2022 can be found here.

SIMIODE VII Statistics

366 students participated, forming 142 three student (or less) teams, with 56 coaches. In some cases coaches worked with multiple teams. Several teams did not have coaches. 109 teams submitted a final ten-minute video for judging.

296 volunteer faculty and industry personnel served as judges. The judges rendered 870 team scores and constructive comments. This gave each team, on average, 8 judge scores and comments for a great deal of feedback through which students will grow with respect to their modeling abilities.

Overall, 27 of the 109 submissions obtained an outstanding award.

Team Submission

The SIMIODE YouTube channel has a channel with (most of) the presentations that obtained an outstanding award. The presentation that my students put together is below.

Congratulations to Royce, Adi, and Henry for their excellent work!

I Received a Class of 1934 CIOS Honor Roll Award

Gregory Mayer / / awards

Last week I was again honored to receive a teaching recognition from the Center for Teaching and Learning at Georgia tech – the Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 CIOS Honor Roll. This time for the Summer 2021.

This particular award was only given to instructors who have an 70% response rate and have top scores on certain items on the CIOS. The CIOS is an anonymous survey that students voluntarily complete for their classes at the end of the semester. The 1934 Honor Roll award acknowledges instructors who have earned excellent scores on questions related to instructor’s respect and concern for students, level of enthusiasm about teaching the course, and ability to stimulate interest in the subject matter.

I could not have been given this award unless most of my students last semester filled out the survey, and students gave high enough ratings for me to be considered for the award.

So I want to thank every one of my 160 Summer 2021 students my five teaching assistants who all together made the course as an enjoyable experience for me to teach and the course to run as smoothly as it could possibly have run.

The Math Refresher Bootcamp for incoming MS Analytics Students

Gregory Mayer / / curriculum

For the last few weeks I was fortunate to have been able to lead a Math Refresher workshop at the Georgia Institute of Technology with Dr. Rebecca George for incoming Graduate students in the MS Analytics Program. The workshop was meant to give the incoming students a quick overview of some of the pre-requisite math content they need for their program.

This was the second year I was able to give the workshop. Student feedback we collected last year from the workshop was incorporated this year to improve the sessions. One of the largest changes we made was to spread the learning out over several weeks instead of trying to cram everything in one week. Some of the topics we cover are difficult to learn, especially if you haven’t seen them in a while.

In our workshop sessions we covered linear algebra, calculus (differential to multivariable), probability and statistics in several sessions spread out over four weeks. The curriculum we developed and sourced is on a Canvas website that is open to the public:

https://gatech.instructure.com/courses/245270

I am Teaching a Linear Algebra Series on EdX

Gregory Mayer / / Uncategorized

I am very happy to see that EdX is re-launching a series of linear algebra courses on August 23 that I will be teaching! We offered these courses last fall and after making improvements to them it is great to see them available again! These courses are approachable to anyone who would have completed an integral calculus course (eg – AP Calculus BC). I think they could be a resource for high school students taking linear algebra courses or other courses that require linear algebra, as well as those who are preparing for graduate school (need a refresher) in a variety of fields including engineering, computer science, and data science. The courses are free to audit.

Many thanks to Georgia Tech Professional Education for their help in putting these courses together!

Here is a link to the first course in the four-part series, and lecture slides for the first course (PDF).