Therefore, the key is what kind of practical problems your team will face. Modeling actuarial is not to examine the programming ability of the team, but to examine the ability to transform practical problems into data languages and solve them. Therefore, it is not that the programming software used is very sophisticated. If it can be solved by common simple software, there is no need to use complex and sophisticated software. Generally speaking, there are four commonly used softwares for learning mathematical modeling, namely MATLAB, LINGO, MATHEMATICA and SAS. You don't need to master everything, just one. The key is to use this software programming to solve practical problems.
As for reference books, you can read some books such as mathematical modeling cases, or some books with actuarial guidance in mathematical modeling, mainly to learn ideas, see how winners translate practical problems into mathematical language and mathematical models, and then see how they solve models.
In a word, the fundamental purpose of mathematical modeling competition is not to examine the programming ability of the team, but to solve practical problems.