da Vinci Deathlon

On Thursday 26 May, 16 excited Year 5 and Year 6 students met early at school to board a coach and travel in peak hour traffic up the Pacific Highway to Knox Grammar School. We arrived in high spirits ready to participate in the annual da Vinci Decathlon.

The da Vinci Decathlon is a competition where teams of eight students from different schools compete against each other in academic challenges. Similar to a sports decathlon, this competition has ten events – but they involve problem solving, lateral thinking, maths, philosophy and the arts. More than 1,000 students from over 100 schools across NSW and the ACT attended the day.

We had an enormous amount of fun and true to Leonardo da Vinci’s quote ‘learning never exhausts the mind’ our energy never flagged as we worked in small teams on various tasks throughout the day. In the end, we were very proud to achieve first place in both Cartography and General Knowledge (Year 5 team), and Creative Producers (Year 6 team).

Everybody worked really well together as a team and we used nearly all of our BLP muscles through all the challenges with which we were presented. A very big thank you to Mr Baker and Miss Harding for helping to mark the papers and for enthusiastically motivating and supporting us throughout the day.

Congratulations to the Year 5 team: