Our two fantastic ToM teams!

Our two fantastic teams completed the Tournament of Minds challenge in an arduous remote learning environment. Mr Collins and I are so proud of the effort and commitment demonstrated by our students. 

Stephanie Haskett and Nathan Collins

ToM Coordinators

Year 10 team

Cisem Kolac, Maddison Lay, Sophie Luong,  Lisa Nguyen, Jazmyn Rizzuti, Kuber Thakur, Kelly Tran

The Year 10 Team challenge was to have a conversation with four people from the past on a common global issue. 

Nearing the beginning of the term, myself and a few of my friends became interested in a seemingly ambiguous competition called the Tournament of the Minds, after seeing it pop up on the feed of our Geography Google Classroom. Having never signed up to such an event before, and with our free time mostly spent aimlessly, holed up at home anyways, the four of us decided to enter and try our luck. It was quite different from what I had initially expected, it required a lot of teamwork and commitment, and a whole lot of research, (we reached a total of 42 pages, to be exact) but I was pleasantly surprised by the reliable and extremely talented team members I would be working with for the upcoming six weeks- we make quite a good team don't we? 

With remote learning still in play, many of the crucial elements that defined the Tournament were unattainable due to our long distance, so when it came to figuring out how we were to present our findings, we were presently stuck. After listing our options on our ever growing Google Doc, we stumbled upon the idea of creating an animation. It was an ambitious idea requiring a huge amount of time, effort and team cooperation, but it was the best shot we had. We worked extremely hard on creating a cohesive script- even managing to create a dramatic storyline: an enticing courtroom drama where the integrity of influential historical figures battled it out in court- myself, as the team animator, drew up pages upon pages of caricatures on our courtroom personas, and our star editor Kelly Tran pieced it all together. 

Some of the best moments were not while we were researching, but rather the meetings we would have weekly. It was something I looked forward to and will miss greatly as we conclude the competition. The conversations and long chats we would have as a team after the meetings ended, were a silver lining in the otherwise quite repetitive and dragging day. 

Overall, it was a very exciting and extremely stressful process, especially nearing the end, but ultimately a very memorable and fun experience that I would recommend to anyone who is curious. 

I guess it is my turn to say that, we have now reached the conclusion of the case of The Battle of the Minds. This court is hereby adjourned! 

Cisem Kolac - Year 10

Year 7 and Year 8  - Stage 4 STEM team

Kareem Abualfoul, Jade Caddaye, Lucas Kim, Jayden Mallawarachchi, 

Youshaman Nazoraia, Adriano Rotondaro, Montana Wasif

The STEM challenge placed our students in out of space creating uniquely different messages on each of the three individual objects and the fourth message which is revealed when these three objects are connected together.

Tournament of Minds was an amazing experience for everyone in the team.  We were able to work together, record and communicate really easily even during COVID which shows how much teamwork we had in this team. Our challenge was to provide three designs of objects that would be sent up into space (hypothetically). We brainstormed and discussed our ideas and placed our own specific touch into our project. In this time, we made virtual 3D Models, drew, criticised and gave feedback to each other. With each person, they worked hard and attended meetings even though they had busy schedules during online schooling. In the end, we ended up with a product that all of us were happy with. Though our main journey is done, we are waiting for our next challenge named the 'Spontaneous Challenge'. It is a random challenge where we virtually do not have any idea what we have to do and present it in a certain amount of time. This experience is something that we were very happy with and we hope to win the competition when they release the results soon. 

Lucas Kim - Year 8