TOM State Finals

Sacred Heart College’s Science Technology Tournament of Minds (TOM) team were crowned National Champions after competing against teams from Australia, New Zealand and Thailand in Adelaide over the weekend.

The team of Year 7-10 students; Jack Bailey, Lily Boss-Bailey, Jack Ducie, Olek Tindall, Samson Wheeler, Declan Williams and Josh Wilson, endured Regional and State Finals before qualifying for the National Finals.

The College’s Engineering Mathematics team also attended the National Finals and won Honours.

Sacred Heart College originally entered eight teams into the regional finals at ECU Joondalup and five of these teams won places to compete in the State Finals. Two of these teams then went onto compete for WA in the National Finals.

The Head of Gifted and Talented at Sacred Heart and WA Director of TOM, Mrs Tanya Atherton, said: "I had seen first-hand what my son had gained from TOM and I am in awe every year of how much every participant gets out of the experience.”

TOM is an Asia Pacific problem-solving program and competition in both primary and secondary schools, which has taken place annually since 1987.

Samson and Olek described TOM as great team bonding experience.

“Being part of this competition is a great way to express your creative thinking and problem-solving skills in a short amount of time”, they said.

This year, the competition involved 15,000 students across Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia and was divided into four disciplines: Science Technology, Engineering Mathematics, Social Sciences and Language Literature.

Students benefit from TOM by learning about teamwork, developing creative problem-solving approaches and techniques, taking risks, experimenting and presenting their challenge solution to an audience.

Last year, Sacred Heart College’s Language Literature team won the National Finals.

The results follow Sacred Heart’s success in the da Vinci Decathlon, HackED, ICAS, Just Start IT, and the World Scholars Cup.