Math 355 - Mathematical Modeling

Project Guidelines

The topics for either the individual project or for the group project can be virtually anything mathematical.  I expect you to use your own interests and resources to choose a topic.  Ideas for topics can be found in your textbook, through other classes, and on the web.  Past contest problems for the Mathematical Contest in Modeling may give you some good ideas - students in past semesters have found it a good source of projects for either the group or the individual project.  The web page for the contest is http://www.comap.com/undergraduate/contests/mcm/.  The problems are fairly in-depth and might be overkill for this course, especially for the individual project.  You might want to look at the high school contest problems for ideas that you can expand on for appropriate and tractable projects (note that the high school problems are generally too low level if not expanded upon).

For each project you will do both a report and a presentation.  The presentation should contain the big ideas, including an outline or overview of the method(s) used to solve the problem, and the results and the implications of the results.  However, the presentation should not include most of the mathematical details, even though those details are often where the bulk of the time in solving a problem are.  This is typical of most mathematical presentations.  In contrast, the paper report will be significantly longer, as it should contain the material presented as well as at least some of the mathematical details.  The report will include a justification for why the project is interesting or should be done, an overview of what the project is trying to measure or calculate, the procedure used to solve the problem, including a fair amount of the mathematical details, a summary of the results in both mathematical and real-world terms, and, if appropriate, a discussion of the likely sources of error, the error expected, any additional variables to include in a future modification of the solution, or reasons why variables were excluded in this solution.  The report is not a printout of the Maple or Powerpoint presentation, nor is the presentation a reading of the report.  They are fundamentally different, and need to be prepared separately.  The grading rubrics that I will use to grade the projects are given below for each project.

The individual project presentations will be done in class.  Groups for the group project should be between two and four people, inclusive.  The presentations for the group projects will be done at the Student Academic Conference on April 20.  They will be presentations, not posters, at the SAC. 

I expect you to pay attention to the other individual project presentations in class and to attend as many of the other group project presentations at the SAC as you can.

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