On Saturday 27 August, two teams from Magdalene competed in the 2022 Tournament of Minds Regional Finals at Broughton Anglican College, along with Miss Sarah Manzin and Mr Marco Cimino. Tournament of Minds (ToM) is a program for all primary and secondary students providing the opportunity to solve authentic, open-ended challenges that foster creative, divergent thinking whilst developing collaborative enterprise, excellence and teamwork. 

The first team, made up of Emilia Leopardi (10), Keira Predl (10), Charlotte Cornett (9), Jessica Vida (9), Kailee Edgar (8), Aaron Leopardi (8), and Isla Attard (8) took part in the Language Literature challenge, and they write:

“Our team, ‘The Heroes Behind The Mask,’ participated in the Tournament of Minds Language Literature competition last Saturday. Our team has spent the last six weeks preparing a 10 minute presentation in response to our challenge. 

Our challenge was the following: Your team is to choose three antagonists from three different genres who join together to share their side of the story based on misconception of their personality, characteristics and motives in the text.

Our team of seven consisted of Walt Disney, The Witch (from Rapunzel), the Queen of Hearts, Dr Facilier, Rapunzel, The White Witch, and Tiana. We explained how these three villains aren’t actually the villains in their original stories, however, Disney made them out to be horrible villains. Our team created a script in the form of a song, created costumes, completed budgeting and paperwork in order to complete our challenge. We also completed a spontaneous challenge where we had five minutes to come up with a solution to a problem, and our team worked together to find the best possible solution.”

The second team, made up of Jasmine Mihok (10), Andraya Liebrand (10), Dominique Clapson (9), Henry Goldfinch (9), Isla Pearce (8), and Isibeal Abbey (8) took part in the Social Sciences challenge, and they were tasked with explaining how a mysterious ring was found, what it meant, and why it should be preserved. They chose to look at a halo, and debated the nature of it.