Continued Enrichment Success
September 30, 2009
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Seven Nudgee College students have continued the College's success in the Enrichment area after being awarded Honours at the state final of the recent Tournament of Minds competition.
Keegan Coomer, Jack Hardy (Year 8), Paddy James, Daniel Mastroianni, Nic Redcliffe (Year 9), Darcy Birmingham and Matthew Tresillian (Year 10) were invited to the State Final after winning the regional secondary division in the Maths Engineering category.
The Tournament of Minds competition involves seven students working together to solve spontaneous and long term challenges in either a primary or secondary division. All work and solutions to the open-ended challenges are devised entirely by the students.
The spontaneous challenge is an unseen challenge, solved in a very short time, in front of a panel of judges. In the long term challenge the group had six weeks preparation time in which to develop a ten minute presentation they performed in front of an audience and the judging panel.
Teams are awarded scores for both challenges which are added together to determine the winning teams.
In addition to the secondary team, Nudgee College also entered two teams in the primary division.
Dean of Learning and Teaching Mr Sean Riordan congratulated the students involved and acknowledged the importance of activities such as the Tournament of Minds as part of the College curriculum.
“Nudgee College has a strong history of doing well in these types of competitions and has performed very well this year,” he said.
“Activities such as the Tournament of Minds help students discover new ways to learn and think and work with others which are important lessons in an ever-changing future.”
Also excelling at a state level are eight Year 8 students who will travel to Sydney in Term 4 after winning the Queensland division of the da Vinci Decathlon earlier in the year.
Now in its second year in Queensland, the Decathlon is an academic interschool gala day run in the spirit of an Olympic Decathlon, with events of an academic nature. The concept was originally developed by Knox Grammar in Sydney where a New South Wales division had been running for the last seven years.
Keegan Coomer, Yhale Fien, Matt Gamin, Pat Gracie, Jack Hardy, Edward Keir, Campbell Martin, and Chetan Thapa competed in a range of activities from poetry to engineering.
"The da Vinci Decathlon tests logic, knowledge and problem solving across a range of areas including english, maths, science and engineering," Yhale and Pat said.
"Our result means we have been invited to Knox Grammar in Sydney later this year and hopefully we will continue to do well."
Mr Riordan believed the tremendous amount of success achieved by Nudgee College’s gifted and talented students was testament to the good work being done in the Enrichment area.
“Nudgee College has a very well developed Enrichment program for gifted and talented students and the results are speaking for themselves."
"In addition to the College’s recent success, three Year 11 students travelled to the United States in May to compete in the Future Problem Solving Program International Conference which is a tremendous achievement.”
