Pulteney TOM Primary STEM team win TIF

This year two Pulteney Grammar School teams represented South Australia at the virtual Tournament of Minds International Finals (TIF) hosted by the Western Australian Tournament of Minds (TOM) committee on Saturday 16 and Sunday 17 October. Unfortunately, due to COVID, no other countries participated in TIF. This year the competition was run as two competitions with one winner in each section, some categories also received Honours. South Australia was scheduled to compete against Western Australia, Northern Territory and Tasmania in a face-to-face format and were filmed and judged online. Unfortunately, due to a last-minute lockdown, Tasmania could not compete. New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, and the Australian Capital Territory competed against each other online.

Throughout the day, the teams were given three hours to solve a challenge related to their discipline. In this time, the teams needed to solve the problem, make costumes and props, write a narrative and prepare a ten-minute performance to present to a team of judges. The teams also needed to respond to a spontaneous problem during the three-hour challenge. For the spontaneous challenge, the teams were presented with a problem in which they had four minutes to discuss their response, build on their ideas and then present a creative and divergent response in a one-minute time frame.

Our teams consisted of Lincoln Nikitins, Cameron Hughes, Oscar Mitchell, Lincoln Davey, Mark Xu, Jedda Dadds and Zara Chiera (Secondary Social Science); Alicia Bollinger, Scarlett Lamb, Sophie Johnson, Juliet Zollo, Ella Liang, and Livia Ogunsanya (Primary STEM). Both teams performed very well on the day, going to great lengths to answer their 3-hour challenge with depth and complexity. Congratulations to our Primary STEM team as they received 1st place in their category. They were the only team to win their category for South Australia this year.

Karen Penn and I would like to thank the teams for their hard work over the many months and the parents for their support; we are extremely proud of the teams. We thoroughly enjoyed working with the students in this challenging event and were pleased to see how much the students gained from being involved. May we have many more years of TOM at Pulteney!

Sue Mavropoulos
Tournament of Minds Coordinator and Facilitator
Gifted and Talented Coordinator and Teacher