Hard work, creativity and teamwork shine bright

Team Aquanaughts and team PapaBrocks are St Laurence's Parish School's most successful Tournament of Minds teams. Teams of students from St Laurence's Parish School have been competing in the Tournament of Minds for six years and this year both teams walked away from the regional competition with awards. Tournament of Minds involves teams of students working collaboratively to problem solve. The team of students are required to solve demanding, open ended challenges from one of four disciplines and then have six weeks to plan and create their solution without any help from anyone outside of the group of students. The four disciplines include the arts, STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), language literature and social science. Both St Laurence's teams chose the arts where their challenge was to pick a local legend and act out their life. This challenge required research before developing a creative interpretation where students had the opportunity for artistic expression in the form of dance, song, musical instruments, theatre and all forms of visual arts. Team Aquanaughts chose Dr Glenn Pereira as their local legend. "We acted three main things that happened in his life. One being when he tried to get into Uni, his wedding and his first time delivering a baby," Aquanaughts team member Seb Bernardi said. "I liked when we performed because it was six weeks of hard work and it was just so good to perform it and get a result," Seb added. Aquanaughts were award with second place honours which is quite an achievement for this very competitive tournament. The judges awarded the team extra points based on their humour and costumes. Team PapaBrocks were required to pick two local legends and they decided on Tony Bernardi and Nedd Brockmann. For their performance the team was awarded the Spirit of TOM. "We got the Spirit of TOM Award because of our technical difficulty and how we got over it. We also added everybody's ideas," PapaBrocks team member Brooke Matthews said. Team PapaBrocks strengths were their use of multimedia and language as they incorporated a video and students even had to learn Italian. All students learnt new skills whether it was learning Italian, learning how to sew as the students had to make all their costumes by themselves or even working as a team. For Brook, it was the local legends who inspired them who also showed them perseverance and not giving up. "Both teams did really well, we've done this for the last six years and these two teams have been the most successful which is really cool," St Laurence's Tournament of Minds coordinator Jessica Eijkman said. "They have the Spirit of TOM and a second place with honours which is amazing because it is very competitive, there were lots of people there and lots of schools and they did really really well." Students, from years 3 to 6, said they enjoyed spending time with other students, developing their team work skills and seeing everyone's creativity. Students also agreed that they are very lucky that get to take part of this tournament in their school and they couldn't have done it without Mrs Eijkmen. "It was a very fun six weeks, these guys were amazing," Mrs Eijkmann said. "I actually cried when they performed because I was so proud of everyone."