Math and the Mouse 2014: Report on Epcot's Traveling Tourist Problem

As you may have read recently, our group had some fun on Friday, May 16th participating in the Great Epcot Race, or as we professors called it, the Traveling Tourist Problem. There were five teams (four student teams and one professor team), and the challenge was to accomplish a list of 18 tasks spread throughout the park and to do so as efficiently as possible. There was a lot of excitement, competitive spirit, trash talk, and general sneakiness -- and that was just the professor team.

The activity was more than just a game, though. The race accomplished a lot of things:

It gave the students an opportunity to make decisions and create strategies that relate to a major topic of study this May (the Traveling Salesman Problem),
It gave students the opportunity to collect time/distance data that they will use as part of this project, and
It encouraged cooperation, communication, and the use of good problem solving skills.

As promised, we want to tell you a little about the winning team and their strategy. The team that finished the tasks in the shortest amount of time was the team of Arianna, Jordan, and Kate. Here is a photo of them in front of the popular Test Track ride.

Before the day began, they (like all the other groups) did some strategic planning. They studied the durations of the shows and available times to meet characters, and they looked at attraction wait times from the previous day in an effort to predict the times for the day of the contest. On game day, the winning group made a few adjustments to their plan and they ended up with an itinerary that accomplished all requirements in the following order:

Soarin’
Soarin’
Test Track
Test Track
Group Photo with a topiary (Buzz Lightyear outside of Mission Space)
Ellen’s Energy Adventure The Seas with Nemo and Friends
Turtle Talk with Crush
Club Cool
Captain EO
Journey into Imagination
Living with the Land
Spaceship Earth
Have Cast Member write “Math and the Mouse” in foreign language (Spanish in Mexico)
Gran Fiesta
Picture with a Character (Donald Duck in Mexico)
Watch a movie in the World Showcase (China)
Maelstrom
End at Rendezvous Point

One very neat thing about the process is that the students used a class set of iPads (provided by Furman’s Buckman iPad grant). For this activity, they used them to track their paths through the park using a GPS-related app that kept this automatically for them. A summary of the winning team’s path for the day is shown below (with numbers corresponding to the list above). The actual GPS output is somewhat unreliable though to visualize walking paths because it thought people were walking when they were experiencing attractions (sometimes going as fast at 64.9 miles per hour on Test Track), so we made modifications to visualize just the walking portions.

You will notice that they did a good job minimizing their walking and crossbacks. You will also notice that there is a stop at 13.5. This was a stop at a Fastpass kiosk to pick up a final Fastpass for Maelstrom -- the final attraction on their journey. Here is a picture (kids these days would call it a selfie) of them at the rendezvous point after they realized that they were the first ones there.

To view all groups' progress another way, consider the grids below that show the attractions on the left and the time of day across the top, broken up into 10 minute intervals between 8:50am and 4:40pm. The attraction labels may be hard to read, but the order of the attractions on these grids starts at Spaceship Earth and rotates through the park clockwise:

Spaceship Earth
Ellen's Energy Adventure
Test Track 1
Test Track 2
Gran Fiesta
Maelstrom
La Cantina de San Angel
World Showcase movie
"Math and the Mouse" translation
Club Cool
Captain EO
Journey Into Imagination
Soarin' 1
Soarin' 2
Living with the Land
The Seas with Nemo
Turtle Talk with Crush
Topiary
Character picture

The grids are posted in order of team finish. You'll notice that the fourth place team (orange) has fewer grid marks than everyone else. This is due to the fact that they didn't record exact times for some of the non-attraction requirements (taking a picture with a topiary, getting a "Math and the Mouse" translation, etc.). Rest assured, they provided photographic evidence of them performing these tasks, they just don't have exact times for them.