6 Issue 54 – October 2015 – QUEEN MARGARET CALLING
The Year 7 and 8 team, Isabella
Barber, Amelia Taylor, Phoebe
Wood, Emily Brown, Teneka Te
Moananui and Emma Sillay, impressed
judges at the regional and national problem
solving competition to win first place at
both competitions.
Along with Middle School Learning
Enrichment and Acceleration Programme
Coordinator (LEAP), Holly Gooch, this
talented group of thinkers will now travel
to Sydney, Australia to compete against
international teams.
“We are all ecstatic – just over the moon.
All of our hard work had finally paid off,”
Isabella comments.
The Tournament of Minds is a
competition for teams of students in which
they solve challenges in a selected discipline
of either Applied Technology, Language/
Literature, Maths/Engineering and Social
Sciences.
The girls had to grapple with a number
of tasks in their chosen section, Applied
Technology, including a long term challenge
and a spontaneous challenge.
For the Regional Wellington
Competition, the girls were set a six week
task to build an original design from a
Queen Margaret College has won the Applied
Technology section of the National Tournament of
Minds Competition for the second year in a row.
National Win
For QMC
Meccano Multimodel Set and programme
their design to clean a classroom by itself.
As well as build and programme
their robot, they had to create a digital
presentation with coding, pictures,
information and video of their creation, the
Greener Cleaner 2000, and devise a skit to
perform to the judges.
At the National Competition, the team
then had to deconstruct their work to create
and programme a new robot in three hours
without the help of an instruction manual.
Isabella says competition was fierce
throughout the Tournament of Minds with
all teams giving it 100 percent.
“The tasks have been very challenging –
it has made us stronger as a team.”
The team has been lucky to have the
support of student coach, Charlotte Barber.
She was a member of the Year 9 and 10
team that won the 2014 National Applied
Technology title and travelled to Melbourne
last year.
Year 4 – 6 students Charlotte-JaneMears,
Rishika Khera, Florence Bygraves, Rebecca
Hockley, Amelia Taylor, Jaskiran Rahi and
Beatrice Fordham Duncan also qualified
for the National Competition after placing
first in the Junior Social Sciences section at
Wellington Regional Year 4 - 6 Social Science Champs Wellington Regional Year 4 - 6 Literature Runners-up
Regionals.
For the Social Science section at
Regionals the group had to devise a play
based on seven characters from history and
perform this describing how each person
would be eliminated from the ‘Weakest
Link’ challenge.
The team had 12 weeks to prepare,
which included making costumes and
props, researching, publishing a script and
lastly learning their play off by heart. They
also faced a spontaneous challenge on
competition day.
At the National Competition they were
given a surprise challenge where the students
were given just three hours to write a script,
make costumes and props and then perform
the play. While the girls did not place at
Nationals, the team that named themselves
the QMC Hobbits, had a great time.
Another team to gain success at
Tournaments of Minds this year was the
Year 4 – 6 team of Imogen Turnbull,
Sofia Pippos, Imogen Bilbrough, Daisy
Carter, Anna Schofield-Matthews, Divya
Srinivasa and Molly Davis. At the Regional
Competition they were runners-up in the
Junior Literature section.