Each team and each participant may want to prepare for SCUDEM in different ways depending on their individual interests and what skills they bring to the challenge. But there are a few general strategies that I recommend.
Meet with Your Coach
It can help to have a quick online meeting to plan for preparing for SCUDEM. That is, to plan what skills your team may need, coordinate how you might choose which challenge problem to work on, what software you might want to learn and use, and discuss roles each team member might have and/or need.
Review Past Challenge Problems
Challenge problems and outstanding student videos from past events can give you an idea of what the types of problems you might see and how you might approach them.
- Past problem statements are organized here.
- SCUDEM VI 2021: challenge problems are in this PDF file, and Outstanding Award team videos are available in a playlist on the SIMIODE YouTube channel.
- SCUDEM V 2020: challenge problems are in this PDF file and Outstanding Award team videos are available in a playlist on the SIMIODE YouTube channel.
There are many submissions and challenge problems to review! Your coach can recommend some old challenge problems and outstanding submissions to review and what to think about while you are reviewing them.
Decide on What Skills your Team Needs to Learn
Depending on the individual skill sets and interests of your team members, you may want to decide how to approach the following.
- Developing a mathematical model: your team may want to review some theory of mathematical modeling with differential or difference equations.
- Approximating solutions to differential equations: while there are many methods for providing exact solutions to differential equations, often (but not all) problems in SCUDEM are approached with equations that will not have exact solutions. Rather, the equations that teams use often require a numerical method to approximate the solution.
Among the team members you’ll also want to decide on a few tools to use to approach the challenge problem including:
- Video recording software
- Collaborative/cloud-based Presentation tool (eg – Google Slides)
- ODE system solver (eg – MATLAB)
Complete a Past Challenge Problem with Your Team
A great way to prepare for SCUDEM is to work through one of the problems from a past challenges with your team. I can recommend some of the challenge problems to work on. One of the challenge problems that were given before the pandemic would be a good place to look, as there are no presentation videos with solutions. There are some comments that describe general solution strategies that you can read if you like (its probably better to read them after you finish creating a solution yourself). If your team works through one of the problems fully and create a video for it, just like you would for the actual SCUDEM, I could give some feedback. Or depending on how much time you have you might want to just create the slides.
Additional Tips
Henry Yu was given the Outstanding Award for his groups submission in the 2023 SCUDEM challenge. In the video below he gives his tips on how to prepare for SCUDEM.
Henry Yu describes some of the resources that he used to prepare for SCUDEM.