Open Gate Babice hosted the Logical Olympiad
A total of 32,190 competitors from 1 660 schools from the entire Czech Republic registered for the fifth year of our Mensa-organised and ever more popular Logical Olympiad. The organising team, headed by Zuzana Poláková, managed the demanding registration of participants and schools, website amendments, co-ordination and organization of the entire competition, and the online nomination round. After that, regional co-ordinators joined the fray, and took the initiative with arranging premises for regional rounds in all 14 regions, looking for sponsors, distributing the assignment forms, lists of children who qualified for the regional rounds, finding volunteers who would help with the regional rounds, and organizing the entire “D Day”, i.e. Friday 2nd November, 2012. The management of the Central Bohemian regional round was perfectly handled by Markéta Erbsová.
For the first time, The Kellner Family Foundation and the eight-year Open Gate Grammar School became the general partners of the competition.
“Our foundation supports on a long-term basis projects supporting education and motivation both of students and teachers to study and learn. We are pleased that we can support a competition aiming to develop the independent thinking of the participants, ” said Hana Halfarová, the Director of the Open Gate and University projects in The Kellner Family Foundation.
Besides financial support, this prestigious school gave us the premises of the Open Gate Primary School at our disposal for the purposes of organizing the regional round of the Central Bohemian Region. In all, the 95 most successful competitors out of 3,103 children and students from the Central Bohemian Region visited the beautiful premises of the school, and competed in the pleasing environment prepared for us in Babice.
I am really happy that The Kellner Family Foundation appreciated the Logical Olympiad and supported it, as the competition definitely deserves such support thanks to its broad scope and focus. We – the volunteers, competitors, teachers – have already come to understand this fact, although many companies from the commercial or industrial environments who were asked for support failed to see it.
From now on, I will only write in superlatives. From the morning arrival in Babice where the school employees welcomed us with smiles right the (open) gate, parking on the premises, and morning wake-up coffee (getting up early to get there on time was really the only sacrifice we had to make), classes with big interactive screens and projection equipment, utility rooms for test assessment, a class for parents and persons accompanying the children, great biscuits, soft drinks, and fruits for competitors and volunteers, the tour through the premises, and in particular good mood and maximum willingness to help throughout the entire day. Besides the volunteers, members and friends of Mensa, students of the school also helped with organizing, guiding the groups of competitors through the premises, and giving them information about the school, handing over the tests, as well as evaluating them and helping whenever and wherever needed.
The competitors obviously enjoyed the nice school environment. It was cute to observe especially the younger children from the primary school category who played with the interactive screen and enthusiastically watched their drawings appear in the prepared presentation about Mensa and the Logical Olympiad on the screen of the laptop. They also liked the extracurricular activities offered to the pupils by the school, the gym, theatre... Children from the grammar schools appreciated the teaching methods of Open Gate, and the benefits of Open Gate, which offers also a boarding school option. A group of boys of about 12 years of age could be overheard discussing all the benefits of such approach: “Yeah, it’s great! When you have a fight with your parents, you do not have to see them!” “True, and when you fall in love, nobody at home can find out!”
This year, for the first time, I asked my colleagues from work to use their so-called “Day for a good deed” offered to us by our employer, T-Mobile, for volunteering activities, to come and help us with organizing the regional round in Babice. I would therefore like to thank my five colleagues for their help.
The day was concluded by the winners’ award ceremony in the theatre that constituted a part of the premises. Besides the applause for all of the winners and the most successful competitors, another round of applause by all of the competitors, volunteers, and Mensa members rewarded Open Gate.
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9.11.2012