Academic

Enrichment

Strive ever to widen and deepen your hearts and minds. Mother Gonzaga Barry

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Our Academic Enrichment offerings give students the opportunity to extend themselves and apply their skills in critical and creative thinking.

The Da Vinci Decathlon is an academic competition designed to challenge and stimulate the minds of school students.

Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), widely believed to be one of the world’s greatest thinkers and scholars, the Decathlon places a particular emphasis on higher order thinking skills, problem solving and creativity.

In teams of eight, students compete across ten disciplines including Engineering, Mathematics and Chess, Code Breaking, Art and Poetry, Science, English, Ideation, Creative Producers, Cartography and Legacy.

Future Problem Solving is an international educational competition for students of all ages, focusing on the development of critical, creative and futuristic thinking skills. The program challenges students to apply their minds to some of the significant issues facing the world today. Topics covered recently have included Mars, drones, food wastage, living in poverty, stress and neuroscience.

One of the benefits of Future Problem Solving is its requirement that we look at real world issues ... and develop an understanding of the numerous aspects of a given problem.

Hannah, Year 10

The Ethics Olympiad is a competitive yet collaborative event in which students analyse and discuss real-life, and timely, ethical issues. In teams of five, students learn to think rigorously for themselves, defend their position as a team and consider reasons and cogent arguments.

Students develop a broad range of skills which, together with logic and sequential thought, are highly transferable, powerful aids to success in many professions.

This global competition also provides students with valuable feedback and mentoring from the judges, who are university lecturers from all around the world.

EVATT is a simulation of the United Nations Security Council, where teams of two students from Year 9, 10, 11 or 12 represent member states of the Council. Students independently research their assigned country before representing their nation's foreign policy in debate session, which are run almost entirely by the real Security Council's rules of procedure. Students compete after school/weekends.

The Kids Lit Quiz is an annual literature quiz for students aged 10-13 years. Teams of four students are asked to answer 100 questions on children's literature divided into ten categories, which vary each year.

Lunch Time Talks on Fridays during lunchtime are a learning opportunity for our students to hear inspirational people share their stories.

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