In Moody's Mega Math Challenge 2014, more than 5,000 high school students across the U.S. set out to determine what makes a school lunch easy on the stomach...and the wallet. Participants pored over data, crunched numbers, and used mathematical analysis to determine how school lunches can be both healthy and tasty while staying within district budgets. They created math models to study students' caloric requirements based on individual attributes and to examine the effectiveness of the new school lunch mandates.
Of the nearly 1,200 solutions that were submitted, six finalists, chosen after two judging rounds, presented their findings at the final round of the Challenge on April 28 at the Manhattan headquarters of The Moody's Foundation, which awarded a total of $125,000 in scholarship prizes. The Charter School of Wilmington (Team#3015), Delaware, took home the fifth prize of $5,000.
The contest is organized by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).
