Kenakena team wins national TOM champs
Kenakena School is the national social science champion after creating ‘Crological Land,’ in a challenge that involved solving a conflict between two groups at the national Tournament of Minds competition.
Tournament of Minds (TOM) is a team problem-solving programme for students from both primary and secondary schools, which looks beyond the usual academic and sporting achievements and offers realworld benefits designed to help shape students into employees of the future.
Kenakena School has been entering TOM for the last six years, with teachers Janine McDonald and Tatia Downer spending a lot of time each year preparing the students.
This year Kenakena entered three teams in the TOM regional competition held in Palmerston North.
With two of their three teams winning their categories they went on to compete in the national competition in Wellington, with the team Kenakena 1 beating all the competition to come out on top.
The social science team’s challenge involved creating a dramatic event which would leave two groups of people reliant on each other.
The groups had to portray differences in their leaders’ personalities that caused conflict, and demonstrate how other group members managed to bring the leaders together to achieve collaboration.
“The Kenakena team based their solution around how our brains have a logical and creative side,” said Janine McDonald, who along with Tatia Downer has been running TOM at Kenakena School for six years.
“They developed two groups of people, one group being smart and formal and the other group being wacky and weird.
“These groups lived on separate islands and as their islands became polluted they chose to migrate to the same island without realising that this is what they’d done.
“On the new island they stumbled upon each other and the leaders were not impressed that their island was being invaded,” Janine said.
“While the leaders were arguing the townsfolk from both sides came up with an idea to work together to build a beautiful town using both sides of the brain.
“Eventually the leaders gave in and started to cooperate with each other.”
Their ‘Crological Land’ was created as a combination of logic and creativity.
“This team was stunning,” Janine said.
“They managed to be innovative, witty and funny while still managing to nail the judging criteria.
“It was a winning combination and the audience and judges loved it.”
The winning team is unable to compete at the Australasian Pacific Final in Darwin, Australia this year due to the prohibitive cost .
The school says that, as a regular part of Kenakena’s commitment to give all students a chance to excel in their chosen field and learn skills such as teamwork, effective problemsolving and thinking outside the square, it will still aim to repeat the achievement next year.