Boarding their flight to Adelaide on Thursday morning, seven pupils from Launceston Church Grammar’s Junior Campus will take the hopes of the North with them.
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The pupils will be competing in the international Tournament of Minds, pitching their wits against not only fellow pupils from across Australia, but from New Zealand, Hong Kong, Thailand, South Africa and Uganda.
We all click, we all work together really well together.
- Launceston Church Grammar pupil Lily Case
It’s been an intensive and challenging time for the Grammar team, who recently won the state final in Hobart in the primary schools’ Social Science category.
Lola Eastaugh, Sophie Lamb, Patrick Best, Hannah Woollams, Dineth Vithanarachchi, Lily Case and Phoebe-Jean Thomson, all aged between 10 to 12-years-old, are clearly at ease working together after developing a strong team bond.
Their state final success came after a six-week preparation that was entirely self-directed, stepping away from teacher-led learning to tackle a whole problem from start to finish.
“We have six weeks basically to come up with a play that goes for about ten minutes, and they give us a problem and we have to answer as best we can in a play form,” Lola Estaugh said.
“Our problem was ‘an artificial island’ and we had to choose two countries to take a group of each and move in with on the artificial island.”
The competition involves a spontaneous challenge with no prior information, testing creativity, teamwork and how pupils problem-solve under pressure – including the ‘lock-down’.
“You have to spend three hours with no outside contact and you’re given a problem, and you have to write a play, practice it, make the costumes and props and then perform it,” Sophie Lamb said.
The pupils all agreed that learning to work as a cohesive team, taking into account each other’s strengths and weaknesses, has been one of the biggest takeaways from the project – that and making their own decisions without teacher intervention.
“We all click, we all work together really well together,” Lily Case said.
Teacher Greta Paul is overseeing the Grammar team this year and said the pupils owed a great deal to another teacher at Launceston Grammar, Allison Bassano, who is a judge at the international final this year.
She said Grammar is the only primary school in the North to win at the state finals and will be joined by teams from Hobart in Adelaide.
The Grammar students will be at Flinders University this week honing their teamwork, hoping for a win, but, Lola said, would be “happy just to have got so far”.