How High Tech High students used their brains to win $10K studying e-bikes with math

MIDDLETOWN - Kevin Liu, 17 from High Technology High School, was the first to autograph his team's $10,000 oversized check with a signature he jokingly described as a John Hancock in size.

He was celebrating Friday in teacher Raymond Eng's classroom as he and teammates were recognized for using complex math and computer science to figure out real-world questions — in this case, to study the growth of e-bikes.

The seniors — Liu was joined by Michael Gao, 18; Kevin Guan, 18; Amanda Guan, 17; and Amanda Lin, 18 — had placed third in the annual M3 MathWorks Math Modeling Challenge earlier that week. Their 20-page submission was one of 650 papers from the U.S. and the U.K.

They were one of eight teams selected to travel to New York City and present in front of judges with doctorates in math.

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After presenting, Kevin Guan, who is not related to Amanda Guan, remembers his teammates whispering to him. "They’re like 'What’s your prediction?'"

Guan, who is the only member of his team to have made it to the finals both with this year’s team and last year's, had correctly guessed third place.

The M3 competition works like this. Juniors and seniors from high schools form teams of three to five. The students choose a continuous 14-hour period to read a prompt and write a paper explaining their use of math and computer coding.

Pasta, pizza and pedaling

This year’s prompt asked students to model the growth the sale of electric bikes, or e-bikes, which have battery powered motors that assist with peddling.

Over Costco pasta and pizza, the High Technology High School students met at Lin’s house in Holmdel in early March and sequestered themselves for 14 hours, starting at 7 a.m.

“We did mock questions before and … a past year’s problem in 2020 had an electric truck one,” Gao said. “We did that mock and we used a Bass diffusion model. And so when we got hit with the bikes problem, we’re like, 'Hey we can just use the same thing.'”

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Their paper, which Gao said they submitted “precisely three seconds” before their time was up, analyzed data on the rate of e-bike adoption in the U.S. and U.K. and modeled future figures for the years 2025 and 2028.

They used a machine-learning algorithm and found that being in an urban environment and price of electricity were the most influential factors in e-bike adoption, while concern about the environment had little impact. They then looked at the impact of e-bikes on lowering carbon emissions, reducing traffic congestion and increasing the overall health of individual e-bike users.

Liu said making the models were not particularly difficult, but finding good data for the models was difficult.

“Some of the data had gaps, so you have like a table and then some of the things would just be missing,” Guan said. “You have to figure out what you do with that.”

Lin said the data given by the M3 competition was from the European Union and the U.S., but the question asked about U.K. and U.S. e-bike sales. She said the team spent a lot of time searching for the U.K. e-bike sale data.

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After the paper was submitted, a whole list of judges read through each team’s submission.

Eng, the team’s coach who is a former engineer working in nuclear facilities, estimated that by the end of the competition, between 16 and 20 judges with doctorates have read and ranked each paper.

After making the finals and presenting their paper to a panel of judges, the judges asked the team questions.

“I think a lot of them were testing just how deeply we thought about our models,” Gao said. “Some of them sort of tried to debate maybe some of our ideas or suggest where we can improve, but they obviously don’t expect you to have perfect answers for everything. They’re just looking for explanations.”

Guan said, “Considering that (the judges are) Ph.D. mathematicians and we’re know-nothing high school students, they’re very considerate.”

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Using math beyond the abstract

Guan added that participating in the competition this year and last year solidified his desire to study applied math, which he’ll be majoring in at Princeton University.

“Besides just money, this is a great way of actually using math and seeing it in a real work (context),” Liu said, “Because when I do math, it’s normally just for competition purposes or it’s like really abstract (work). And by doing math modeling, I can actually see math’s impact on society.”

Eng, who has coached teams for the M3 competition since its start in 2006, said it’s important that the competition is teaching students to use math, critical thinking and logical analysis to delve into real world problems.

He hopes that “society can become better by thinking through logically (its) problems.”

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He plans on pasting a photo of the team in the middle of the check and hanging it on the wall of his classroom, to join all the other the presentation checks.

In the past 17 years, Eng's students have won scholarships in 14 of the competitions.

“It is a high honor to be selected by the consensus of so many professionals,” Eng said.

The first-place prize of $20,000 went to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia. And the runner up prize of $15,000 went to St. John's School in Houston, Texas, according to the M3 competition.

Olivia Liu is a reporter covering transportation, Red Bank and western Monmouth County. She can be reached at oliu@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: High Technology High NJ students win M3 Mathworks competition