As Woody would say, yee-haw friends! We are officially a week into Math and the Mouse and it has been a blast! It has easily been one of the most-action packed, challenging, rewarding, fun, and learning-focused weeks we have ever experienced. We are Sam and Erin here to give you a recount of our 7th day in Orlando, which was a day full of many different things, so hold on as you read. Also, a quick early shout-out to Alyssa, as today was her 21st birthday!! Our day started at different times depending on which groups wanted to practice presentations, but most groups were down for breakfast by 8am and getting one good practice in before starting with the big group directly at 9.
We started the morning by presenting the Mickey Bar projects that everyone has been working on for the past week. The goal was to use Magic Kingdom's estimated ride wait times to determine where the most people are located in the park in order to determine the best places for a Mickey Ice Cream cart throughout the day. Our groups of three presented, and then received immediate, constructive feedback from our peers and professors. The presentations took most of the morning due to the time it took to present and receive feedback, but it was very rewarding to see the hard work we put into these projects pay off. The feedback sessions were extremely productive and in-depth as students and professors suggested edits to allow these good presentations to become great! Most of the feedback revolved around small edits and story consistencies, and the professors told us that all of the groups did really well, which was also exciting. Everyone approached the problem from a different angle, keeping the presentations fun and entertaining. After we finished the presentations, we ate some cupcakes in celebration of Alyssa’s birthday.
We took a quick break for lunch before meeting again to do a quick lecture and get introduced to our next project, which we will work on until Monday’s presentation. Our lecture today was led by the wonderful Dr. Bouzarth and focused on optimizing profits and allocating scarce resources. This is connected to our previous lectures as we are still talking about state spaces and optimization, still in the context of Disney World! We worked through the setting up of a problem together as a class by creating the constraints and objectives as well as modeling these with a word problem. This problem had us creating Woody and Buzz toys given the resources that each of these toys needed and the number of resources that we had available. The goal was to allocate our scarce resources in a way such that we maximized profit. We worked through creating variables, setting up constraints for our resources, discussing real-world constraints such as the number of toys being positive, and finally defining our objective. Once we had these constraints and objectives, we graphed out the constraints on a coordinate plane by having our axes be the number of Woody toys made versus the number of Buzz toys made. Since we had three scarce resources, this meant that we had three inequalities that were intercepted in a space constrained by all three inequalities, called the feasible region. We will learn in the next few days the specifics on how to solve these problems, but setting the problem up and modeling it was really fruitful. We ended around 3:00 and quickly got ready to leave for Hollywood Studios at 3:15!
During our free time in Hollywood Studios, we split up into smaller groups. Sam went with some group members to the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular show. It was cool to see the visuals and how they performed some of the aunts featured in Indiana Jones. Sam’s group then went on to ride Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance. The whole group rode this the last time we were in Hollywood Studios, but it was so cool they wanted to do it again. After that there was about an hour before dinner, however, most thrill rides had a longer line than there was time for. So, the group made their way over to Lightning McQueen’s Racing Academy and watched that show. No one in that group had ever seen it and it was cool to all experience it for the first time together. Erin followed a similar route with her group and first went to the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular Show, which they really enjoyed, then Lightning McQueen’s Racing Academy, which was also fun! They then saw that the line for Mickey’s Runaway Railway was only 30 minutes, so they went there as that is a really enjoyable ride, then finishing off with the Muppets Vision 3D show before heading to dinner! It is always a good test of the strategies that we have picked up from the professors when we have free time and are left to our own plans, and both of our groups did great! Tonight the group had dinner at Roundup Rodeo, an all-you-can-eat BBQ restaurant in Toy Story Land. It was a great celebration of our work on Project 1 and our long morning of presentations! The food was really good and it was all-you-can-eat, which different people took advantage of at different amounts. Each table had a lot of fun, bonding time, and lots of laughs. We both sat at the same table with Dr. Harris, Katie, Ellis, Hayes, Will, Morgan, and John, and we had a lot of fun as we all enjoyed the food, the atmosphere of the restaurant, and bonded further with the group. The other tables also had a lot of fun as Dr. Hutson (aka Gladys), Emily, Hannah, Savannah, Virginia, and Tori transformed into “southern women” after eating a lot of barbecue. The last group included our birthday girl Alyssa, and the full restaurant enjoyed singing to her at the end of our meal. As we walked out of the park we bonded further as we discussed all that happened at dinner.
This is Erin and today was a wonderful day! The presentations this morning were full of productive feedback and it felt really good to hear about everyone's process and solutions. We did a lot of excellent work in a short amount of time and I am really proud of all that we have done! We definitely have a great group of engaged and passionate mathematicians here and receiving all of the feedback will definitely make us all better in the long run. The free time in the parks was also a really fun celebration leading into a very entertaining dinner. It was an amazing day!
Now this is Sam and overall, today was a great day! I loved starting off by sharing presentations and rounding out the day with dinner as a group. It was cool to see the nuances in different peoples' presentations and I enjoyed seeing the different ways that groups respond to the project prompt. Furthermore, I have loved getting to know other group members better and getting to spend time with everyone. Dinner at Roundup Rodeo was definitely my favorite part of my day. We were all just chatting and I laughed more tonight at dinner than I have this whole trip, and this trip has been full of laughs and smiles for me. I am excited for tomorrow and can't wait to learn and experience more with this awesome group of people!
Well friends, this has been a great day. We have loved blogging with you! See you for tomorrow's blog and so long, partners!!
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