WHS students nail viral video poser - November 2015
WANGANUI WINNERS: Elia Nicolin (left), Amaan Merchant and Julian Schurhammer of Wanganui High School earned a national science award.
IF A New Zealand student uploads a video clip that goes viral, how long will it take before 1 per cent of the world's population has seen it?
That was the question posed to contestants in New Zealand's Next Top Engineering Scientist competition this year and a team of three students from Wanganui High School nailed it.
Etia Nicolin, Amaan Merchant and Julian Schurhammer competed against 179 teams from 68 schools and won the $6000 prize which was presented to them at the Wanganui High School prizegiving ceremony on Thursday.
The competition is organised by the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Auckland and is sponsored by Orion Health and Fisher & Paykel Healthcare.
Peter Bier from University of Auckland, who runs the event, said this is the seventh annual competition and the quality of submissions was generally high, with many teams using innovative approaches to solving the problem, including an increasing number of teams making use of computer programming.
"As with previous years the competition problem was purposefully constructed to be open-ended in nature.
"To answer the problem required teams to make sensible assumptions around various aspects of the problem."
The Wanganui High School team were given the question at 9am on competition day and by the 6pm deadline they had to submit a written report, of no more than 10 pages, outlining their solution.
The team started by defining what a viral video is and borrowed a definition from "a well-known YouTube celebrity" who says a viral video must gain 5 million views in three to seven days.
They then got down to crunching the numbers and looked at a wide range of data to see what their best approach could be. They surmised that a video that originated in New Zealand would have as much chance of going viral as any other because social media devices such as Reddit, Facebook and Twitter would be where most of the sharing occurs.
Julian, Etia and Amaan produced their prize-winning report that clearly showed how they had worked through aspects of the question, the mathematical models they had used and those they deemed to be unsuitable and why.
Student Julian Schurhammer said it was not only the prospect of a prize that made the competition so attractive, but also the possibility that winning would provide students with an advantage for being selected to study Science Engineering at Auckland University.
So how long will it take for one per cent of the world's population to view a viral video uploaded by a New Zealand student? "Within 8.63 and 18.81 days , based on a first 24-hour view count of 200 and a maximum view-count of 100,000,000" according to the conclusion in the students' report.
They also concluded that the video may never reach 1 per cent of the world's population as the population might increase faster than views on the video did.