StM News

Among more than 9,000 students — including course-completers in AP Statistics, AP Computer Science, and AP Calculus — St. Martin’s Episcopal School rising senior Boyu (Jeremy) Hua took home first place in the recently announced results for the After the AP Data Science Challenge. In addition to being first in the nation, Boyu was the only student in Louisiana to earn a spot in the Top 10.

Boyu emerged as a standout in the nationwide challenge, mastering diverse modeling approaches that proved both rewarding and challenging. When asked why he chose to participate, Boyu cited his own interest in working on real-world problems in the classroom: “The chance to work on practical data science projects and engage with instructors on topics beyond the syllabus was incredibly appealing. I wanted to challenge myself, broaden my skills in coding and statistics, and see how far my accumulated expertise in data science could take me.”

With his model achieving an impressive final test R^2 value of approximately 0.92, Boyu exemplifies the level of innovation and skill nurtured through the challenge. Reflecting on Boyu’s achievement, Upper School math teacher Ed Leonard said, “Boyu is a truly remarkable young man with an incredible future. I can’t wait to see what path he chooses. I believe the best learning is experiential, whether it’s a semester project or the After the AP Data Science Challenge, where students like Boyu can get their hands ‘dirty’ analyzing and interpreting real-world data. I’m very proud that Boyu jumped right in and took on the Challenge while also tackling four AP exams.”

Working with Jupyter Notebooks and R, an open-source statistical software, students participating in the challenge engaged in complex data analysis techniques using digital technology, advanced algebra, and complex statistical techniques. For students to succeed in the challenge, mastery of linear regression, polynomial regression, and the basics of machine-learning were all required.

In collaboration with Data Science 4 Everyone at The University of Chicago, North Carolina State University Data Science Academy, and the CourseKata platform, Skew the Script — a nonprofit education initiative led by a collaborative of AP Statistics teachers — organized a national data science challenge for high school students, to follow their AP examinations.