Congratulations to Heaton students Malek, Zehba, Dan, Aidan and Oliver who have earned a spot at the Future Problem Solving National Finals.

New to Future Problem Solving? Here’s a reflection on the year so far written by two of our Year 7 finalists, Melek and Aidan.

FPS is a worldwide competition where teams compete against each other. At Heaton, we compete in FPS’s Global Issues Problem Solving division. Every year we have four main topics for FPS, which could be about anything that might be a problem in the world in the future. This year our four topics were transportation, sleep patterns, gamification, and living in poverty. The first two topics are practices for the competition, with the third one being the QP (qualifying problem) to go to the National Finals.

At the start of the year, we started researching the topics and learning how to do the six FPS steps for each problem. The six steps are reading the future scene, creating challenges, writing the underlying problem, making solutions, establishing criteria and writing out an action plan. We spend the first block of every Wednesday in the LRC with Mrs Boniface and Ms Green learning about our topics.

When you complete each problem, you have to fill out a booklet in two hours and fifteen minutes, which is hard work. If you are in the top 10 in New Zealand for the QP, you are invited to go to the National Finals. If you score in the top three at the National Competition, then you are invited to compete at the International Finals. 

At the start of the year, our team did not do so well. We finished 2nd to last in both of our first two topics. After a not so good start, we started to work harder to prepare for the qualifying problem by doing a lot of research and reviewing all the steps. Then we did the QP. We did very well and my team felt great about our efforts. In the holidays we found out that we made it to the National Finals. Now we are preparing for the National Finals on 31 October. Wish us luck!