Tournament of Minds

Tournament of Minds offers teams of students the opportunity to solve authentic, open-ended challenges that foster creative, divergent thinking whilst developing collaborative enterprise, excellence and teamwork. This year Fort Street entered five teams across challenges set in The Arts, Language Literature, Social Sciences and STEM.

The groups worked with their Year 11 facilitators to prepare a 10 minute presentation over a five week period. The Arts team  was successful in the regional rounds. Their performance was a musical in which they had to incorporate various elements such as a 1920’s dance, a painting from the 1930’s, clothing from the 1950’s and a song from the 1960’s.

As regional champions, they represented the school and Sydney East region as they competed against the other 13 TOM regions at the NSW State Championships at the University of New South Wales. In the State Championships they had to prepare a presentation defending arts funding. Instead of 5 weeks they were only given 3 hours to prepare. Whilst being unsuccessful on the day, the students learnt many techniques that will assist them next year.

Congratulations to all the 35 students who took part in the TOM challenge this year and especially to the Arts team of Sanjana Krishnan-Iyer, Esther Alex, Mary Koutalianos, Benjamin Alpert, Jack Coleman, Lola Rose Van Overdan and Phoebe Rosser.

Special thanks to the Year 11  facilitators: Aidan Elwig-Pollock, Barry Li and particularly David Fu for all their help.