On Sunday 18th August 2024, our Tournament of Minds team consisting of seven students from year 5 and year 6 represented Caningeraba in the Primary STEM discipline at The Southport School (TSS). Tournament of Minds is a problem-solving program for teams of students from both primary and secondary years with an aim to enhance the potential of our youth by developing diverse skills, enterprise, time management, and the discipline to work collaboratively within a challenging and competitive environment. There are four disciplines of The Arts, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), Language Literature and the Arts.
Our team of Allen, Rosie, Grace, Van, Murphy, Leon and Avery selected the STEM challenge six weeks ago, which required them to identify a type of plastic pollution that was an issue in our environment, research the consequences of this form of pollution, think of a solution to mitigate the impact of that type of pollution, create a working prototype of their solution, design a scaled sketch of the prototype, generate a way the waste could be used, write a script and perform a ten minute dramatic performance to showcase their solution incorporating their chosen performance skills of song and costume whilst also addressing a detailed list of criteria set by the judges to earn points in a variety of categories.
The students have dedicated countless lunch breaks, after school sessions and weekend sessions working on this at school and have also gone home and worked on their designs, 2 the script and rehearsing lines and lyrics. They had to show great resilience and teamwork throughout the preparations to overcome challenges. They were supported by their families throughout the preparations and by Mrs McKeon, Mrs Naughton, Mrs Christy and myself who all volunteered their
time and provided feedback at various stages. It takes a village to raise a child but it also takes a village to get a team ready for Tournament of Minds so thank you to all those who supported the team. On Sunday I think we may have had the biggest representation of family members in the audience out of all the 18 teams participating from Gold Coast schools. Our team did an amazing job and impressed not only the audience but also the judges as they were informative, entertaining and engaging and had everyone including the judges bopping along to the song adaptations, laughing at their comedic elements and holding their breath in awe while watching the team’s working prototype.
The students also participated in a spontaneous unseen challenge on the day, which they had also spent time practising in mock trials at school and went in with confidence and came out bursting with pride. They had every reason to be proud and were wonderful representatives for our school not only in the challenges but in how they conducted themselves throughout the day. We had been awaiting the results since Sunday with much anticipation and were informed Tuesday evening that our Caninga Ninjas team won the Primary STEM division and are now invited to participate in the state competition being held on Sunday 8th September 2024.
Bree Dlugosz
Gifted and Talented/Enrichment Coordinator