DA VINVI DECATHLON
By Ruby M, Annabel B, Harper W, Greta S, Sammy R, Elena C, Frankie R
On the 23rd of April, students from year seven, year eight traveled to Knox Grammar School representing Oxley in the junior Da Vinci decathlon. In addition to this, Oxley had a year 9 and 10 team to participate in the senior Da Vinci decathlon, with each team consisting of 8 students. The da Vinci Decathlon was founded in 2002 by Knox Grammer School, and has expanded from a small local competition to attracting thousands of students each year and even having competitions in New Zealand and the UK. This is an academic event that consists of teams of 8 students, who tackled 10 different papers focusing on the talents of Leonardo Da Vinci in the fields of Engineering, Art and Poetry, Mathematics, English, Ideation, Legacy, Cartography, Creative Producers, and Codebreaking. Schools from all across the Illawarra region sent a group of students from years 7 and 8 to spend a day tackling these subjects as a team. We began training for this event midway through term 1, and met once a week to complete practice papers together and discuss strategies for the day. Students faced unique challenges in papers to test their problem-solving skills and collaboration, focused on this year’s theme “time,” with around 2 hours to complete each paper as best they could. Each of our teams performed very well on the day, with our year 7 team finished 6th overall out of a total of 69 teams. Our year 8 team finished 5th overall, placing first in Art and Poetry, Engineering, and English, and third in Legacy. Below are some accounts of the experiences these students faced on the day: