Tournament of Minds

On October 14, a group of 7 students, Ethan Saw, Pearl N, Rebecca Yetman, Harshul Singh, John Hu, Archita Maheshwari, and Akshay Anil Nair travelled to Sydney, Australia to participate in the Australasian Pacific Final for Tournament of Minds competition. We were not only representing West Island School, but Hong Kong as well.

After a fun day at the Toranga Zoo, the competition started on October 16, where there was a photo challenge whilst on a ferry cruise around Sydney Harbour. That night the ‘All you can eat Pasta and Pizza’ was exceptionally good and we thoroughly enjoyed it.

Saturday was competition day. We took our nervous hearts as we headed on where we started to prepare. There are two different events in the Australasian Pacific, the Final 3-hour challenge and the Spontaneous. The 3-hour challenge is just as the name says it; you are given three hours to prepare for this challenge, after which then your team must present it. The Spontaneous is when you are given a short problem to discuss for four minutes, and then you are given one minute to explain your findings and theories. You are judged for your creativity and ability to work as a team.

In the afternoon, it was our turn to present our 3-hour challenge. We kept our nervous hearts to a minimum as we presented. The problem we were presented was ‘What would happen if one thing in history was taken away?’ We chose “opium”, and we did a decently good job explaining how different Hong Kong would have been without the Opium War.

In the end, we won the photo challenge, where we had to take a picture of something that represented Hong Kong. We won a really cool “Hat Stand”. Congrats to Team Tasmania for winning the secondary Social Sciences challenge, another category we competed in.

In conclusion, we really learned a lot by communicating with other teams, learning how they do things differently, teamwork, and lastly, creative thinking.

John Hu 9H2

For more pictures of the event, please click here