Students Attend Connecticut State ‘Problem-Solving’ Conference

Newtown Middle School seventh graders Nicole Vournazos, Felicia Pan, Chelsea Young, and Amanda Sweat won an invitation to the 2005 Future Problem Solving Program of Connecticut State Conference, which was held on Friday, April 1, to Saturday, April 2, on the campus of the University of Connecticut in Storrs. 

The Future Problem Solving Program (FPSP), established in 1974, is an international, nonprofit educational corporation that offers inspiring and motivating educational materials that encourage students to discover rich and varied ways of thinking. Available to students in grades K–12, FPSP features several curricular as well as co-curricular opportunities to engage students in problem solving.

The foundation of the program follows a six-step model to promote dynamic, creative thinking processes in which the team is to identify challenges related to a certain topic or future scenario, select an underlying problem, produce solution ideas to the underlying problem, generate criteria to evaluate the solution ideas, evaluate the solution ideas to determine the best action plan, and develop an action plan.

The topic for the state conference this year was Depletion of Oceanic Species. The students composed futuristic short stories of 1,500 words or less, related to the chosen topic.

The Newtown Middle School team of Vournazos, Pan, Young, and Sweat, lead by GATES (Gifted And Talented Educational Services) teacher Patrice Gans, was one of 12 teams out of 35 to be selected to progress to the State Bowl. Ms Gans stressed that FPSP teaches students how to think, not what to think.

In order to make it to this level, the team had to complete two qualifying practice problems and one qualifying problem throughout the school year. Trained evaluators score the student work and give feedback including suggestions for improvement. The top scoring teams on the qualifying problem are invited to Affiliate FPS Bowls held each spring. The winners of each respective Affiliate FPS Bowl advance to the FPSP International Conference in June.

This is the first year in which students from Newtown participated in the conference. Although they did not place at the final State Bowl, it was evident that the team had a meaningful and enriching experience. Seventh grader Chelsea Young commented, “Even though we didn’t win, we worked as a team, did our best and look forward to going back next year.”

The state conference required the teams to participate in two separate types of competition. The futuristic scenario for the team was to find a solution to a hypothetical problem of oceanic pollution, most specifically the dying out of the tiger fish species, set in the year 2036. In the first part of the competition the students worked as a team to complete a written booklet, following the FPSP six-step model to explain solutions to the proposed problem. The booklets were then evaluated and scored. The next portion of the competition involved the students writing and performing a skit to demonstrate their solution to the hypothetical problem.

Clearly the favorite part of the conference for all four team members was the skit performance. Felicia Pan admitted that she learned a great deal from attending the conference. “It was a good team effort to complete the booklet part and then the skit — it was like the real world in that you had to work together and get along to complete the project. It was really fun to see the other teams perform skits.”

Nicole Vournazos agreed, “It was so much fun, especially the skit competition. We got to act out our solution using all kinds of crazy materials. It was a totally fun experience and I would definitely do it again.”