da Vinci Decathlon 2022 | Preparatory School
Recently, two teams from Years 5 & 6 took part in an academic competition known as the ‘2022 NSW da Vinci Decathlon’. The competition entailed ten separate competitions throughout the day and each year the competitions are designed around a theme. This year the theme was ‘Patterns’. The boys worked tirelessly and collaboratively to ensure that they completed each of the 10 categories on time. These ten categories included:
ART & POETRY, CARTOGRAPHY: Mapping, CREATIVE PRODUCERS: impromptu drama, ENGINEERING, ENGLISH, SCIENCE, MATHEMATICS, IDEATION: Design thinking, LEGACY: History and General knowledge, CODE BREAKING.
Like last year, the competition was held remotely via Zoom so the boys worked from the Preparatory School and the strict time limits for each competition still applied. This year over 300 year 5 & 6 teams across NSW competed in the Decathlon. It is a credit to our boys at the Preparatory School on the way they collaborated to approach the demanding and challenging tasks and creative problem-solving. It is also commendable to witness their commitment to the team, attending training sessions each week. The boys should be very proud of their efforts, especially the way they supported each other with positive comments to maintain focus and energy levels. Da Vinci relies heavily on team skills: collaboration, initiative, communication, and positive energy and the boys lived up to this expectation!
Our Year 5 team was placed in two categories: 3rd in Legacy and 11th in Science. Congratulations boys on an incredible achievement.
Reflections by Dinal Perera, Aarav Sharma and Jayshan Shanmugaratnam
The day of the competition was hard work as you had to be focused for the whole day. What made it even harder was you had to transition between different papers really quickly and each paper was very hard. Whilst you may have worked on a paper, you couldn’t stop if you finished as you needed to go and help on another paper that wasn’t finished. You also had to work on things that were unfamiliar to you to help the team. The harder papers were code-breaking, Mathematics and some of the English. We had fun with the creative tasks in English, Art and Poetry and Creative Producers. Legacy was also fun as we could use our knowledge to answer questions.
We really enjoyed getting to know our team each week and understanding how we can collaborate as a team. If we did it again, it would help to know more about our strengths as a team to plan the competition day. Some of the challenges of the day were to stay focused and being really flexible when people had different approaches to solve problems, for example the Engineering and Ideation problems. We found that the saying was true that ‘great minds think alike’ however, we also discovered that these great minds also think in vastly different ways!
Reflections by Adam Jeroncic and Christian Farah
The competition day was very challenging for everyone. We found some of the papers really hard such as Cartography, Mathematics, code-breaking and Art and Poetry. Equally, while these papers were hard, we also had the most fun, especially when we had to approach the problems with creative thinking such as in Creative Producers. On the day the biggest challenges for our team were solving arguments, time pressure and being time efficient. Overall, it was a challenge to stay focused and concentrate for the whole day. It was really important that we practiced teamwork as part of our training because there is just so much to master in one day. If we did this again, we think having a timer for some of the papers might help us to improve our pace to complete them.
The theme for our day was ‘Patterns’ and this concept was very hard to apply for some of the tasks. As a team, we really enjoyed the Quiz at the end of the day. We’re also very impressed that all that marking from over 150 Year Six teams was completed in a week. Thank you, Knox Grammar, for hosting and organising.
