Mighty Minds Challenge 2011

Aw man. Not again?

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is the obligatory Mighty Minds blogpost of the year brought to you by none other than yours sincerely.

And so it comes the time when I am roped in for this mentally-torturing yet incredibly thrilling challenge again, and I even had my previous team members from last year with me again: Ome and Razan. Upper secondary Asma Team 2 consisted of Aifa, Eel and Eah whereas Lye May, Intan Sophia and Lina Hosni were in the lower secondary Asma Team. I was the last one to arrive at Alor Setar Mall as opposed to the last two years.

So basically what we did was wander around the mall because we had to wait an hour more after the lower secondary MCQ round is over to register. A huge blow was delivered to my gut as I realised that a) I’ve already surpassed the Teenage (Level 1) stage which also means b) I am currently on Teenage (Level 2) which brings me to c) worse, nerve-wrecking, mind-twisting questions for the first MCQ round. Soon, it was already our turn and we entered the slaughter, I mean, challenge arena with palpitating hearts ready to jump out of our ribcage.

As soon as the first question appeared on the screen, we knew we were dead and gone. It had something to do with meiosis which has something to do with Biology Form 4 Chapter 5 apparently which we haven’t learned in class yet. And since there weren’t any Form 5 seniors with us in our team, we “hentam-ed” the first question…and got it wrong. No matter, it’s just the first question. More to come. Optimism optimism optimism! The second question appeared and once again our hearts dropped when we were asked for the normal of a circle. It’s probably something in the syllabus we have yet to learn or probably not, but either way we took another guess…and got it wrong again.

The next few questions were really tough and out of the 20 questions, we only really, truly, genuinely answered 6 or 7 questions, and the remaining were just guesses, tosses of the coin, and miraculously enough, we got about 4 or 5 questions correct out of lucky guesses. This time, despite the fact that we were dubious with some of our answers, we still keyed in our answer before the 10-second countdown, after the incident last year when we very, very nearly did not make it to the Top 15 because we were too slow.

After the 20th question, we were prepared to pack our stuff and go home, having little faith in ourselves and no expectations at all, but surprisingly we bagged the 12th place in the scoreboard! Celebration! Fireworks! We were in the Top 15! Caleb “Calebous” Lee and his team made the Top 15 as well, bagging the fifth spot (right?). Unfortunately, Aifa’s group didn’t make it. Right after the marks were announced, we were whipped to one side of the stage, given a briefing on Round 2: the hands-on challenge, and set to work at our respective tables immediately.

This time, we expected nothing but literal slaughter for our hands-on challenge. And ding ding ding ding! We were right.

We had to construct a shoe closet that can hold a large amount of shoes but occupy little space, complete with a manually-operated conveyor.

As usual, we were given a bag of materials (this is starting to remind me of the Barney Bag):

• 3 metal wires
• 2 bunches (approximately 30) wooden tongue depressors
• A bunch of chopsticks
• A bunch of satay sticks
• Some rolls of manila cards
• Some rolls of coloured paper
• 3 polystyrene boards
• 2 cardboard rollers
• 2 light bulbs
• A connecting wire
• A switch
• 2 batteries

That’s about all I can remember.

We completed out model with 5 minutes remaining which we spent by clearing our table very slowly, so you can more or less guess how “well” our model turned out.

We didn’t wait long for the results. I wasn’t wholly surprised when one of the judges said all of our models this year were disappointing, because that’s what I thought as well. For upper secondary, some of the teams that got into the Top 5 were SMJK Keat Hwa, SMJK Keat Hwa II, SM Sains Sultan Mohamad Jiwa and I couldn’t remember the rest. Sorry. Sasha turned up as well and we had lunch at KFC before she dropped me home.

I guess I should thank the peeps from Mighty Minds for mentioning that you guys “found someone from Kedah blogging about Mighty Minds”. So, here’s to hoping  that you guys notice this blogpost again?

One last year next year!

Related links (to make this sound like a professional blog):

• Mighty Minds Challenge 2009
• Mighty Minds Challenge 2010
• More photos for the 2011 challenge