GHS juniors place in top 25 percent of M3 Math Challenge

(from left) Aurelia Harrison, April Smith, Willow Barry, Thea Cunningham, and Alycia Hogan-Lopez pose for a picture.

CLARA DEL VECCHIO, News Editor
April 28, 2023

On March 6th, 5 GHS juniors competed in the Math Modeling (M3) Challenge, a math competition held yearly by MathLabs. Thea Cunningham, Willow Barry, Aurelia Harrison, Alycia Hogan-Lopez, and April Smith entered the competition, and placed in the top 25% of all contestants.

“I’m not typically a math person,” Harrison said. “I found the computing parts of the challenge to be particularly difficult, and I was the most helpful in translating the hard math into written words for the final report, which I enjoyed. I like that this challenge, while math-centered, incorporates other aspects of learning.”

The M3 Math Challenge, which is a free contest for high school juniors and seniors, takes place over 14 hours, and requires students to interpret the challenge problem, create an algorithm to model the problem, and write a paper presenting their results. More about the M3 Math Challenge can be found here.

“The knowledge that we were able to finish the challenge was really inspiring,” Barry said. “It was a lot of work, but we did it, which was very reassuring, and it made me feel very accomplished. I’m so proud of the work that we all did.”

This year’s challenge problem was “Ride Like the Wind Without Getting Winded: The Growth of E-Bike Use.”

“We had to do mathematical projections about the growth and impact of E-Bikes,” Harrison said.  “It was pretty awesome.”

The team plans to compete again next year, with hopes of improving their score.