31 Aug 2018
TACKING Point Public School students have raised the bar with their intellectual feats at this year’s Tournament of the Minds.
Of the four disciplines – arts, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), language literature and social science – Tacking Point won three first place trophies and one runner up (in the STEM category).
The outstanding effort means the school’s winning teams will move on to compete in Sydney at the NSW branch final on Sunday September 9.
If successful, they will then embark on a trip to Darwin in October for the international final.
Tournament of Minds is a problem solving programme for teams of students from both primary and secondary years.
They are required to solve demanding, open-ended challenges from one of the disciplines.
For example, the arts students were tasked with research before developing a creative interpretation in the form of dance, song, musical instruments, theatre and all forms of the Visual Arts.
Students were understandably thrilled with their results and excited to venture to Sydney – and hopefully Darwin.
Maeve Kinchington was part of the language literature team and loved competing in the challenge.
“We had to make a play based on the challenge and include all of the different marks in it, then act it out to the judges,” she said.
“We also had to do a spontaneous challenge where we had four minutes to come up with lots of different ideas.
“Tournament of the Minds is lots of fun, especially because I love working as a team. I love the challenge.”
Bowen Lowrey, school captain, competed in the social sciences category and said it was a lot of fun.
“It was a good experience. We found the remains of a fence and had to investigate who made it and what it was for,” he said.
“It was quite challenging and we only finished on the week it was due. We had five weeks to do it and worked together as a team to agree on the final outcome.”
Brodie Ferrett were unlucky not to win first place in the STEM category after losing their well-designed robot.
“We had to build a robot animal and have it demonstrate movement, sounds and how it ate,” he explained.
“We used hydraulics for the mouth and joints in each of the sections so it could coil. Unfortunately we lost it on the last day while we were recording a video and we left it behind and couldn’t find it.”
The remaining winning team, the arts, loved making their music production.
“We had to do a mix of things for our performance and none of the teachers were allowed to give us any help,” said Jack McManus.
“Our play was about a conservative trying to stop people freely expressing themselves. We built up the characters and then played out the script. It went for almost 10 minutes. We were really happy with how we performed.
Good luck to the three Tacking Point teams who will compete on September 9.