Doing da Vinci proud
By Angela Xiang, Year 6, Trinity Anglican School
IN MAY, I was one of 16 students from Trinity Anglican School who travelled to Brisbane to participate in the da Vinci Decathlon.
The da Vinci Decathlon is an amazing interdisciplinary competition for Year 5 and 6 students for schools from all over Queensland.
There were over 60 teams competing and TAS had two teams — Kewarra Beach Junior and White Rock Junior.
The flight down to Brisbane was accompanied by lots of candy, nerves and excited chatter.
The hotel we stayed in provided us with comfy beds so everyone could get a good night’s sleep to perform well the next day.
The 10-discipline competition started with ideation, science and English. Science proved to involve the most challenges; however, we still managed to complete it along with the other two papers.
Little did we know, the next session was going to bring us even harder problems.
The hours of tireless working didn’t prepare us for the mind messing questions in maths.
The engineering side of things did not instil us with much confidence for we had to build a 3D model of a topographic map out of a piece of paper and some tape.
Creative producers left the team for a short period to perform a oneminute act while other members of the team worked on art and poetry and cartography.
The third session was an enormous relief because we were working on our two strongest subjects: general knowledge and code breaking.
Throughout the day, everyone displayed their areas of skill, knowledge and good teamwork.
While we might not have achieved the perfect score on some subjects, we collaborated, had fun and were proud of ourselves for finishing, doing our best and not giving up.
The time then came for the results to be announced.
Every single student in the room was sitting with anticipation.
When it came to the Year 6 announcements …
“Trinity Anglican School White Rock – first place in cartography”, was read out.
What an amazing achievement.
We also placed in the top 15 teams in six out of the 10 disciplines. What an amazing day. Students and teachers were overjoyed and celebrated by eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts at the airport.
After all, this was our first time in the competition and to receive the honour of coming first in cartography was a great accomplishment for us all.