Senior Digital Engagement Trip

Due to unforeseen circumstances, our year 7/8 DigiCREST team were unable to complete their challenge this year.  As compensation, we headed to the City Library on Tuesday morning for a few hours working with Waka Curd, the Digital Engagement Librarian.

Zac, Caleb, and Nicholas had an absolute ball exploring a number of digital technologies...in a few cases - they were even teaching Waka!  The clear favourite was the Virtual Reality headset, but they also explored robots, programming the vinyl cutter to make decals, a drone hovercraft and a Lego Mindstorm kit.

Thanks Waka for your input - it was a super fun morning!

Nationals Success

How exciting to represent our school and our region at the National Final of Tournament of Minds last Saturday and Sunday (Sept 15/16).  Both our teams arrived at the student Hub at Victoria University, ready to compete and do us proud.

Family support was terrific - thank you so much!  and our two room supervisors, Sarah Best and Zuhra Arnautovic-Wootton, were stellar.

Both teams performed well for the judges and before their substantial audiences.  I was so pleased for the kids when they could come out and tell me that they had done their best - that's exactly what I wanted for them.

There was of course, an added bonus for the Year 5/6 team, who earned Honours in the Primary Social Science category.  This was tremendously exciting!!  I think everyone was then blown away to learn we had been invited to the International Final in Darwin, Australia in less than a months time!

Huge congratulations to both our teams on their successes - both personal and public - you are all fantastic!

Good Luck for the Nationals!

Good luck to our two teams heading off to the National Finals of Tournament of Minds this weekend.  The teams will compete against schools from around the country in a three-hour lock-down challenge.  Victoria University in Wellington is our host for this two-day event.

The teams have put in a lot of hard work in the last fortnight to prepare for this new style of challenge and there have been some clever and entertaining solutions created.

Have fun at the Nationals everyone - you've definitely earned your place.

3 Hour Challenges - TOM Practice

Well, after the outstanding success of our TOM teams, we have had a full-on week training for the Nationals.  The teams have run the full gamut of emotions, I think, as their teamwork and social skills have been tested to their limits.  The creative thinking and originality of ideas is vital at this level of competition, but the things that often sabotage this are the "softer skills".  It is a challenge to keep seven team members focussed and on track with a lot to accomplish in a long/short time frame.  Three hours seems long at the start but it whittles away and the final performance comes around really quickly.  Our teams are working so well, refining skills and character, to work closely as a team and produce results they can be proud of.

We are so lucky to have the community we do - the support of families is vital at this juncture - but these are life skills in action and the learning for these students is massive.