THE EVENT -By Ayla  

The speaker came on and started welcoming all of us and making a speech. She explained how all the Lincoln teams had to come late because of the delay but they didn't miss anything (except for our downtime.) Soon after the speaker had finished her speech a lady dressed in green and another lady who explained that she was our room supervisor walked us over to our rooms for our three-hour preparation. We got separated by the boy's team and we all got in the elevator (which felt extremely small due to the number of people and our big bags.) We all walked into a room that looked like a university classroom since it had a whiteboard at the front and a bunch of desks in front. Next to the whiteboard was a small table on which we put our bags and our snacks.

Our room supervisor informed us that the people to judge our spontaneous challenge were going to be here soon and that we had ten minutes to think of an idea for our spontaneous challenge and present it.

Our job for the big challenge was to create a New Zealand myth that needed to have a city and a museum scene plus a sketch of the myth that we had to give to the judges. After a bit of debating we settled on a half Moa half Human which had healing powers called the Tomoa (Tom and Moa combined.) I started drawing the Tomoa as soon as we thought of it and everyone was giving me ideas on how to make it look more like a Moa and ideas for the clothing and powers.

Some of us were working on the script and the others were working on the props. In about thirty minutes the judges for the spontaneous challenge arrived and gave us our task.

“If you were the president of New Zealand, what changes would you make and why?”

I think we had a pretty good idea, we made a presentation about the north and south islands to combine to reduce pollution. Two people were pretending to be the island while another was pretending to be the president announcing this to the public. I was at the back pretending to be a car with Emily who was pretending to be a person walking over a bridge. Grace M was pretending to be the bridge.

To help you understand this article better, I made a small copy of the script we made for the first scene.

Then Grace says 100 years ago and the rest of us pretend to be building and I was pretending to be drawing the picture of the Tomoa.

After that Grace says that 50 years ago everyone was chatting before an earthquake hit and everyone covers their head and starts to shout.

When Grace says 200 years later it shows three explorers roaming around a forest and looking at Emily, Sophia 1, and I who were pretending to be flowers and trees. Suddenly, Sophia 2 steals Ferns's backpack (which was a plastic bag) and holds it up high. So they use teamwork to get it back. When they do, Emily jumps us and holds a treaty and they all sign it. After that, Sophia 2 and I make an entrance (still pretending to be trees) and everyone goes in. This is when the explorers discovered the picture of the Tomoa that I was holding up. After seeing that, Fern falls over and all the explorers try to help her up. Tomoa appears because she responds to teamwork and heals Fern.

Tomoa starts sharing her history about how she helped New Zealand make an underground city and helped fight in the war and won because of teamwork. After hearing that, everyone decides to turn Tomoas underground city into a marae and tells the story to a museum manager.

Soon, the three hours were over and our room supervisor started leading us to the theater of the university to present everything we had done to the judges. We were going to perform second and we also had to watch everyone else perform as well. After watching all of the performances I thought that we were going to get first or second place.

Right after Lunch was the awards ceremony and we sat down exactly where we sat down when we got there and eagerly waited to see what place we would get. It was very stressful while waiting to see who would be going to Australia but unfortunately, we got the honors award which was SECOND PLACE. I thought it was weird because the people in the first place did not meet all the requirements so I was really upset.