Tournament of Minds - A 5S Perspective!

It all started one day after math when Mrs Stevens told four of us that we had been selected for Tournament of Minds or TOM as we soon started to call it.

Mr Girvan told us and some year six’s that we had been selected for TOM and that in the next 6 weeks we would go about completing our challenges and if we won we would be going to Canberra, Australia. That really got us thinking.

We had a choice to enter Social Sciences, Applied Technology, Maths Engineering and Language Literature. Two of us chose Language Literature, while the other 5S students took up the challenge of Maths Engineering.

For those of us doing the Language Literature, we had to pick two main characters from a list of books and portray their character through a ten minute script, we chose Rue Elsie from the Hunger Games and Pearl Barley from Pearl Barley and Charlie Parsley. Then we chose a topic from a selection of topics, we chose Harmony. Then we set about making the script. It was all about racial discrimination.

The whole script was based around a picture book, so we took a copy of the script and made some changes printed it out and turned it into a 12 paged physical picture book. Then we decided who would play each part and practiced, practiced, practiced and practiced. On the day we had to be dressed in black because that was the etiquette for the day.

This year the challenge in Tournament of Minds for the Maths Engineering division, was to build an adjustable timing device that could be used to time ten seconds and then a randomly chosen time between twenty and forty seconds. We made a pendulum powered device that was designed to bang against wood, to alert to when the set time was up. It was extremely tricky and required a huge amount of fine-tuning.

On Saturday 14^th September we all nervously arrived at Hutt Intermediate School. The day began with the spontaneous challenge; we didn’t know what the challenge was until about 5 seconds before our time started. We had 4 minutes to come up with an answer to the challenge then we had 1 minute to present your answer to the judges. Then we had a 45 minute break in which we squeezed in as many practices as we could. Finally we were summoned by the judges and we performed our ten minute skit.  

When it was all over, they had the prize giving and to our surprise it was announced……..“Language Literature, Honours goes to-Tawa!” and then “the winner of the Language literature is- Wellesley College!!!!!!”

By William, James, Matt and Tom.