With thanks to Year 11 student reporters, Amelie Murphy and Heeju Rho

After success in the World Scholar’s Cup last year, our students were looking forward to this year’s event. Over two days of intense academic competition, four College teams topped the Auckland round of the World Scholar’s Cup, paving the way to the next round of international competition! 

The College entered eight teams of students, divided between the Junior and Senior divisions. They soon discovered that the level of interest in the Auckland round of the competition had grown significantly from last year’s event, with a strong field of contenders. 

The original idea behind the World Scholar’s Cup was to ‘create something ‘different than traditional academic competitions and conferences’: a celebration of the joy of learning, a tournament as rewarding for the team that came in last as the for the team that came in first, an enrichment opportunity that motivated students not just to demonstrate their existing strengths but to discover new ones.’ 

The first World Scholar’s Cup took place in Korea in 2007; a small regional tournament that was followed by the first ‘global’ round a few weeks later, bringing together students from Korea, Singapore and the United States. Since then, the World Scholar’s Cup has grown to reach tens of thousands of students in dozens of countries with the ultimate goal of working through the regions to take part in a final global competition. 

Each year, the competition takes on a theme, this year it was entitled, ‘An Entangled World’, with a focus on six broad areas of focus. With a unique theme chosen each year, it’s a chance to challenge students to extend their knowledge and capacity for learning.

Special Area                     Human Relationships
Science & Technology    The Science of Memory
History                               The History of Diplomacy
Literature                          Voices of the Inseparable
Art & Music                      Braving the Distance
Social Studies                   Black Markets

The weekend was split into four different components to test different areas of learning:

Collaborative writing: Teams were given six essay topics based on the year’s themes. Each team member chose a different topic to write about. The timed team discussion added an element of collaboration and separated the event from traditional essay-writing tasks.

Team debating: Teams were challenged to work together to either affirm or negate a variety of interesting motions.

The Scholars Challenge: Teams worked individually to answer 120 multiple choice questions on chosen subjects with the option to choose more than one answer.

The Scholars’ Bowl:  A fast-paced competition where each team worked with a ‘clicker’ to attempt to be the first to answer a series of difficult questions projected onto a screen.

A fun element of the competition is its alpaca mascot. Contestants ‘adopted’ the stuffed animal to balance out the serious academic side of the event.

Congratulations to all the students who entered this challenging competition, but particularly to the following teams who have qualified for the Global Round to be held in Melbourne this August. 

Senior Division

• Josie Lu, Heeju Rho, Amelie Murphy
• Esther Oh, Christina Chen, Michelle Guan

Junior Division

• Lucas van den Brink, Daniel Huang, Sarah Harper
• Danielle Mayer, Charlotte Cornwall, Sarina Wang

Thank you also to Mrs C Watts and Mr H Kemp for their support in making this happen.

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