On Friday July 17th, a group from collaborative Inquiry III participated in a special English presentation competition called START. START stands for STudy Assembly of Research at Touohgakkan.
It was a competition involving three high schools in Thailand, namely Naresuan University Secondary Demonstration School; SCiUS; Nonghinwittayakom School; and SMK Agama Kota Kinabalu from Malaysia; and ten high schools from Japan, including Tokai University Takanawadai High School, Iwate prefectural ICHINOSEKI DAIICHI High School, Fukushima Prefectural Futaba Future High School, Akita Prefectural YOKOTE High School, Miyagi Prefectural Sendai Daisan High School, Niigata Prefectural SHIBATA High School, Yamagata Prefectural Chidokan High School, Yamagata Prefectural Sagae High School, Yamagata Prefectural Touohgakkan High School. Some groups, including ours, participated online.
The group from our high school gave a presentation on the topic, “How Opening Passages Attract Readers”.
Because there were so many groups participating in the competition, we were divided into five breakout rooms. Our school was assigned to Room 1.
Within each room, the judges selected the two best presentations. To our surprise, our presentation won second place! Naresuan University Secondary Demonstration School from Thailand took first place. We learned a great deal from their presentation, including insights into their culture.
At the end of the event, our students said that they really enjoyed interacting with students from other schools. They were especially happy to have the opportunity to communicate with students from other countries who were around the same age. Moreover, they were impressed by how naturally the international students spoke English.
The students later reflected that, because of the limited time available, they were not able to talk with the other participants as much as they would have liked. They wished they had more time to interact with them, or even better, to have attended the event in Yamagata in person and met the other students directly.
I believe this experience truly inspired our students and will motivate them to become outstanding researchers in the future.
