This year the history mastermind took place on Thursday 14th November at TARA Anglican school for girls. Two teams were sent each consisting of four year 9 students. These teams were A: Abhinav Maliakal, Akshaj Sharma, Elliott Written and Gurshan Kehal, and B: Arabella Chavez Palpan, Asef Rahman, Ella Johnson, and Keira Gurney. The competition is split up between the day. It starts with two twenty question rounds, which are marked with one mark for each question. These question are based on many topics including World Wars 1 and 2, Making of the modern world, Pop culture, Australia between the wars, Australia and the Vietnam war, Movement of peoples, Making a nation, Rights and Freedoms and general history trivia. This was followed by a fun round about flags. After a break we came back and did two more twenty question rounds before a guess the person round with a students guessing round and then a teacher guessing round where Dr. Jackson was robbed by someone who gave two guesses. After a lunch break there was another fun round with true or false questions the finals took place with the top four teams in each year being selected to compete. Two teams were seated in front of everyone and were given questions, had to hit a buzzer before saying the answer to the whole crowd. The day then concluded with the grand finals in the same format.

Personally this experience was great for me. Doing this experience with my friends for two years made me bond greatly with them while learning lots of history through our mistakes as well. While maybe sounding like it the Mastermind was not all that tense, allowing us to discuss and have a few jokes with our teacher and each other. While we didn't place in the top four it was definitely worth going and was an amazing experience. I highly recommend this experience to any student who is interested in history or any student who is looking for a fun experience with your friends and an opportunity to make friends with many other history students from a wide range of other schools.

- Gurshan Kehal, Year 9.