This story appears in the Spring/Summer edition of Contact ³¾²¹²µ²¹³ś¾±²Ō±š.Ģż
Fritz the golden retriever canāt catch the treats his owner throws at him. The YouTube videos of him being smacked in the face with pizza, donuts, steak, hot dogs and sliders went viral several years ago.
But why canāt Fritz catch?
āDog Cannot Catchā was the physics/engineering problem in a math modeling competition, the SIMIODE Challenge Using Differential Equations Modeling (SCUDEM), an international contest for college undergraduates.
Three Kansas Wesleyan freshman received a āMeritoriousā certificate for their answer. This was the second-best result possible, the competitionās equivalent of a silver medal.
Data Science majors Barry Neff Jr., Pensacola, Fla., and Matthew Redden, Gypsum, Kan., along with Physics major Elijah Resano, of the Philippines, won the award with their 10-minute video examining the problem. They looked at it from the point of view of the owner, who would profit from continuing to make the videos with his clumsy dog. Other entries tried to help Fritz out.
āAll three worked very hard, even during weekends and holidays,ā said their coach, Dr. Suman Kundu, assistant professor of Mathematics and Physics. āConsidering they are first years, this is a very nice accomplishment indeed.ā
As first-year students, they hadnāt yet had the classes that would teach them how to address the problem, he said.
āThey never had a programming course,ā Kundu said. āThose are skills you learn after coming to college.ā
One skill they had to hone was organization. Besides adjusting to being first-semester students, keeping up with their courses and learning coding on the fly, the three are busy. Neff is on the menās volleyball team. Redden sings with the Philharmonic Choir and plays saxophone with the Wind Ensemble and The Howl spirit band. He is also on the esports team and captain of the chess club. Resano will be the president of the new STEM Club on campus and is involved with a robotics group off-campus.
Kundu taught them as much advanced calculus and coding as he could before Oct. 19. Thatās when the physics/engineering SCUDEM problem was revealed and he had to step back.
āIt explicitly says you cannot have help from any living being,ā Neff said, so no more coaching. āThat means we couldnāt have tested it on a dog, even.ā
Kundu had no input ā and none of the fun of working on the problem ā until the team submitted the 10-minute video on Nov. 13.
āIt was really hard,ā he said about not being able to participate. āBut at the same time, it was a joy to see them pulling ideas, bouncing them off each other, the way you work in real research.ā
The team looked at different angles, velocity, distance from the dog and air resistance.
āThey had gone through every possibility of doing that with the computer,ā Kundu said. āThey wrote the code for it. They did everything for it in less than a month. They really worked hard on this.ā
To continue making the Fritz videos, the owner should throw the food at angles between 30 and 40 degrees for the treat to land just short of the dog, the team demonstrated.
āWe had absolute zero knowledge how to use the program they offered to us,ā Redden said. āWe had to self-teach.ā
In the end, they didnāt use it.
āTrying something new was what the judges enjoyed,ā Neff said.
The math was hard and the coding harder, they agreed. But those werenāt the most difficult pieces of the competition.
āThe biggest problem was putting what was in our heads on paper so other people could understand it,ā Neff said.
Resano agreed: āIn the competition, there is no wrong answer; it was how you present your answer and defend it.ā
āAs much as itās heavy on math, itās more heavy on how well you can be creative,ā Redden added.
And that was the point, as far as Kundu is concerned.
āAs I say to the boys, the end result is not the main goal,ā he said. āItās the fun you have working with your friends. Teamwork is the most important skill. No research is done single-handedly; you have to have that skill of collaborating with people. You canāt do your science alone.ā
It was a ābig surpriseā to learn they had earned a Meritorious certificate. The Ā鶹¾«Ę· team was competing with experienced teams from all over the world.
āLooking at past years, we saw a lot of names that came back, competing last year and this year,ā Resano said.
The team credits Kundu and Dr. Kristin Kraemer, chair of the Math and Physics Department with their success.
āSuman played a big role,ā Resano said.
āHe prepared us very well for this competition,ā said Neff. āAs much as he denies it, he put a lot of work into it.ā
Kraemer also helped prepare the team with books and tips while coaching was permitted.
They are planning to compete again next year and hope to encourage other teams from Ā鶹¾«Ę· to compete, too.
Fritz, also, has learned. Eight years on, he finally catches his treats ā sometimes.
Story by Jean Kozubowski
