Opti-Minds

Anja Van Hooydonk

Teacher

Opti-Minds 2022 St Marys Catholic College

We have been working together for around seven weeks to represent St Mary's at JCU for Opti-Minds. We all got together and put our creativity together to make an exciting idea for the script and spontaneous challenges.

The spontaneous challenge was very difficult to do as we all have different minds. After we put all our ideas together we made a fun, exciting idea. We were given a topic and image that we had to base our idea on. We all put in our own unique idea of what we thought would be best for the topic we were given. Some of us thought of a lab on the moon run by aliens and some of us thought of a lab run by the QLD government.

The long term challenge was the hardest bit of doing Opti-Minds. From making and memorising the script to making our own costumes and props. It was the hardest to do but we had so much fun and this was definitely our favourite part of the challenge. We had a $50 budget to stick to and we just got there. The props and costumes were so much fun to make and design.

The topic of our script was rising above the ashes. We based our script off Moana and Mulan. The script was about gender equality and how women should be treated equally to men. Our script showed Moana being next in line for chief but Shan Yu and Tamatoa were against the idea of that and tried many things to stop her from being chief. 

On the day we all met at JCU and went through the script a couple of times before we went off to go do our spontaneous challenge, we all didn't know what this challenge was gonna be about until we entered the room. After we finished we weren't allowed to share what the challenge was. We proceeded back to practising once and went into a room with the judges and our parents. We presented our show with confidence and the judges loved it. With the help of Mrs Van Hooydonk we got an honours award and spirit of Opti-Minds award! After our show we went out for lunch together and treated our self with ice-cream.

Doing Opti-Minds helped us create closer connections with each other. Before this some of us didn't even know each other. By the end of it we were so happy with our results and so happy we met each other. We are so lucky to be able to enjoy this special moment with each other and hope to do this again.

Arianna Dodge

Year 7