HEAD OF SWANS

Tournament of Minds

A huge number of students applied to participate in TOM this year and the submissions all demonstrated impressive creativity. This made the task of selecting the teams an extremely difficult one, with 3 teams finally being chosen. We would like to acknowledge the effort put into the applications by the students who were unfortunately not selected and encourage them to consider applying again next year.

The TOM teams have begun their preparation for this year’s competition. Due to COVID, the competition will be based on a video submission. The challenge was released on Wednesday and the teams have started the process of designing their solutions. I would like to thank Mrs Jenkins and Miss Siebert for helping to guide the teams through this competition. 

Chess

The 2020 Interhouse Chess competition will begin next Tuesday lunchtime. This will be run as a round-robin culminating in elimination finals, with the final winner being the College Chess Champion. It was wonderful to see a range of students from years 7 to 11 come to the library at lunchtime last Tuesday to nominate for the competitions and play some friendly games. 

The TRAC Chess Team will be competing against Xavier High School (online) next week in the next round of the Country Secondary Schools Chess Competition. We wish the boys the best of luck (and good strategy) in their games. 

Mock Trials

Congratulations to the TRAC Mock Trial team for their impressive win against St Paul’s Walla Walla in the first knock-out round last week. This was a very different trial to usual, due to COVID parameters, with the team presenting their case over the Zoom platform. The students only had 24 hours to prepare their case and they did an outstanding job researching the appropriate law and learning their roles. Thank you to Miss Kelly for her very professional guidance of the team.

ICAS

An email was sent home last week informing families how to enrol students (through the UNSW website) to sit the ICAS exams this year. The only subjects available are Mathematics, Science, English and Digital Technologies. The enrollment window has now closed. These exams are all online and will be sat throughout August and into September. I will be in contact with the students involved in mid-August to supervise the downloading of the lockdown browser prior to any exams being completed. 

Kylie Woodgate | Head of SWANS