DigiCREST

The year 7/8 DigiCREST team, comprised of Nicolas Neilson, Caleb Woisin and Zachary Doyle are in week 2 of their challenge.  their brief is to "Identify a problem in your school or community and use digital technologies to solve it."  The boys have been brainstorming a range of ideas and today settled on one. They noticed that it can be hard for students to focus on their work at times so they have decided to investigate the creation of an educational incentive website.  Their initial ideas involve students recording their in-class work to earn points that they can spend on creating avatars.  They began to trouble-shoot their audience and the site creation and finished their session with a survey of ten students from each of the Aroha, Tautoko and Haepapa pods.  We are now awaiting contact with our industry mentor - its exciting stuff!

Spontaneous Practice

Our two teams are continuing to develop their spontaneous challenge strategies. Regular practice of these is vital leading up to the Tournament as they can vary so greatly.  The students can be given song lyrics, artworks, or objects to explain, justify, decipher and pontificate about.  They have 3-4 minutes to share their ideas and usually just 1 minute to report back to the judge.  They are marked on very specific criteria and its all about originality, creativity, and collaboration.

Here was today's challenge...

How did this person get here?  Who are they and where are they going?

You have four minutes to create your story and one minute to share it with the judges.  

You will be marked on your collaboration as a group, the creativity in how you tell your story and originality of your ideas.

Long Term Challenge Development

At the beginning of the script writing process for the Long Term Challenges, a lot of team dynamics come into play.  The teams are having to negotiate the sharing of ideas and it's often a real personal challenge to let the group take your idea and manipulate it to fit the common goal.  Experiencing this builds resilience and collaborative work skills and is so useful as these students grow.

Costume Workshops

The Tournament of Minds teams had their last assisted preparation workshops this week looking at costumes and touching on iconography.  Iconography is the study of the elements expected in a given genre.  For example,  if we are telling the story of Snow White, we expect to see an apple, a witch and dwarves.  The students all got to practice basic hand stitching skills and then created a few costumes to represent a given story.  The Year 5/6 team worked on Alice in Wonderland and the 7/8's on Harry Potter characters.  Can you identify the icons used to represent these characters?