High School

Our high school efforts revolve around two textbooks and related workshops. Each textbook is available with a detailed teacher’s guide. Each chapter is designed around three or more relevant decision contexts that often can be used to develop student team projects. The two textbooks are:

• When will I ever use this? Volume 1: Algebraic Modeling
• When will I ever use this? Volume 2: Probabilistic Decision Making

Each textbook can serve as a basis for a semester long course. These courses are being taught in dozens of diverse high schools across the US. Alternatively, even more teachers have used individual chapters to supplement existing courses in algebra and probability. The algebraic modeling textbook utilizes Excel extensively which enables students to focus on modeling and interpretation of results without needing to crunch through calculations. The probabilistic decision modeling textbook uses both graphing calculators and Excel to explore randomness and calculate probability distributions. The textbooks are reasonably priced on Amazon and schools can purchase sets of books directly from us for less than $30 a copy.

We offer three day workshops multiple times each summer at no cost to teachers. We also offer one day workshops for high school teachers during INFORMS annual conferences.

Sample Activities:

• Volume 1
  • Table of Contents & Introduction: Vol. 1
  • Chapter 1- Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM): Introduction & Section 1.1
  • Chapter 2-Linear Programming: Introduction, Sections 2.1 & 2.3
  • Chapter 8- Queuing Theory: Introduction & Section 8.1
• Volume 2
  • Table of Contents & Introduction: Vol. 2
  • Chapter 1- Basic Probability and Randomness: Introduction, Sections 1.1 & 1.4
  • Chapter 2- Conditional Probability: Introduction, Sections 2.1 & 2.6