Tournament of the Minds

Tournament of the Minds

Last Sunday a team of 6 students from Years 4-6 participated in the Tournament of the Minds. Tournament of Minds is a problem solving programme for teams of students. The aim is to enhance the potential of our students by developing diverse skills, enterprise, time management, and the discipline to work collaboratively within a challenging and competitive environment.

Callan, Eleanor, Henry, Karl, Kristian, Thomas and Milla spent six weeks coming up with a solution to this problem: 

Human actions have resulted in plastic pollution becoming a problem for our world. Scientists and environmentalists are racing to understand the environmental impact and various causes of plastic pollution. 

Your team needs to devise an innovative device to remove or mitigate your specific type of plastic pollution. As part of your presentation your team will need to indicate what will happen with the plastic waste that is collected.Your team must create a prototype of your device, demonstrate how it works and create a scaled drawing of the device.

During their time, the team wrote a script, created music, wrote two songs, created a working device and a smaller model and a scaled drawing. They also make many props and created a company logo. 

The team worked extremely well together and the presentation and spontaneous challenge work at Deakin University was amazing. All their efforts were fruitful as the team received honours for their presentation. They also received the Spirit of the T.O.M. award. I am very proud of their journey over the last six weeks. 

Year 5 Maths Game Day

We held our annual Year 5 Maths Games Day at St. Patrick’s. In conjunction with the Maths Association of Victoria 100 students participated in a variety of challenges throughout the day. These ranged from problem solving to games. We entered two teams on the day and one of our teams came second. A big thank you to Matt Hale for all hos assistance with the games day preparation and Karen for her help on the day.

Congratulations to Thomas, Tommy, Sam and Jake for their second place. 

Congratulations to Amelie, Jack, Liam and Kyle who also represented St Patrick’s amazingly well. 

Mrs Liz Lamb

Teacher