Outreach

We’ve developed an interactive lesson, called “Optimization and Minimization,” that introduces students to the important field of optimization using real-world examples. These include deciding the best time to wait for a ride at an amusement park and how Google Maps finds the quickest route between two places. To give students more hands-on exposure to this concept, we additionally created two games that students play in partners with the goal of finding the minimum of some function or surface. Students use their intuition and the concept of slope (there is no explicit math involved!) to move towards the minima, which correspond to the most “optimal” points. The lesson is aimed primarily at students currently learning algebra, with concepts such as slope being highlighted. All of the lesson materials are available for free so that anyone interested can also share this important concept to the next generation!