FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. — A team of high school students from Northern Virginia is helping us get uplifted. They recently took first place in a prestigious math contest.
Members of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology math modeling club won the M3 Challenge. Students are asked to use mathematical modeling to solve a real-world problem.
"This year's problem was about e-bikes and there were three subsections to that problem," explained team captain Jerry Sheng. "We had 14 hours to collect data, analyze that data, make a math model and write everything about that process."
That's 14 hours in one session, which they did in the basement of team member Laura Zhang's home. With a big assist from her parents.
"My parents were fine with it. They said that we were pretty noisy and that they could hear us all the way from the top floor, but they thought it was fun," Zhang said.
The team is losing their captain because he's graduating this year, but the other members of the club are all juniors and they are already planning to defend their title next year.
As first-place finishers, the team walked away with a grand prize of $20,000.
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