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On Saturday the 31st of August, six teams from McKinnon participated in Tournament of Minds. The tournament is an Australia wide competition for teams of primary and secondary students.

McKinnon entered teams in all three categories - two teams in Language/Literature, one team in Social Sciences, and three teams in Maths/Engineering. Over 450 Victorian schools took part in TOM this year and only five from each category received places. Two of McKinnon's teams were awarded Honours, which means that they came equal second with three other schools. The Honours teams were our team (Language and Literature, with Mr Evans) and Ms Nayyar's Maths/Engineering team.

Each team receives a long-term problem and has six weeks to prepare a ten minute performance showing that they have understood and solved the problem. The Language and Literature teams had to read a number of novels and use characters from them in their performance. The judges were looking for how well they interpreted the books and how they portrayed the characters in their performance. The Maths/Engineering teams had to make a sorting device and demonstrate in their play how the device worked. The Social Science team had an environmental problem where they had to solve the problem of toxic waste in Antarctica.

We recommend Tournament of Minds to any student who wishes to participate. We found it a very fulfilling experience, learning to work cooperatively in a group, organising ourselves and thinking outside the square. We and all the other teams would like to thank the teachers involved (Ms Nayyar, Mr Evans, Ms Ozcagli, Mr McTier, Ms Ginger and Ms Orloff) and our student mentors (Nicki Kolb, Gaby Kolb, Sara Sterling and Carmen Tisseverasinghe). We hope they had as much fun as we did.

By Madeleine, Bethany and Kyria of Year Seven