Empowering optimization skills through an orienteering competition

We report on a playful introduction of optimization in a high school. Thefinalevent of this experience has been an orienteering competition, in which the decision-mak-ing component plays a central role. This type of event has been very involving, and itboosted the interest of the students toward operations research. After summarizing the ac-tivities in class that preceded the competition, we describe in detail the organization as-pects and the outcome. We also provide a simple AMPL code that compares the choicesmade by the participants with their optimal trajectory, that is, the one maximizing the scorewith the same traveled distance