Hi Miss White,

I wanted to inform you about our interest in participating in this year's Regional Dada Vinci Decathlon. The team consists of Atticus Crook, Amaan Vakil, Cooper Finnegan, Freya Kelly, Justin Lum, Robert Shannon, Ronin Naumovski, and myself. We are past Dada Vinci representatives of Smith's Hill High School. Each of us possesses the skills required in each category of the competition and as a team we work together to score the most marks in each paper, with hopes of scoring the highest, to place first, second or third.

The Decathlon:
"The da Vinci Decathlon is an academic competition designed to challenge and stimulate the minds of school students. Students compete in teams of eight across 10 disciplines: engineering, mathematics, code-breaking, art and poetry, science, English, ideation, creative producers, cartography and legacy." - Dada Vinci Decathlon website

The first event is Regionals. This year it is on the 11th of April (Thursday). Teams from Year 9 and Year 10 compete with the same papers, just like Year 7 and Year 8 do. Each event has a theme. The themes change per annum. The Illawarra NSW Regional event is held at The Illawarra Grammar School (TIGS).

Normally, Mr Treleaven would hold trials for SHHS several weeks before the competition day to allow time for the teams to prepare beforehand. However, almost all of us are free to prepare outside of school as well. He would form the team based on his judgement and analysis of students and post on a classroom stream dedicated to Dada Vinci as tonaming the 8eight people who made it. Sadly, Mr Treleaven could not coordinate this year and we hope we as a team could represent SHHS in Dada Vinci again. Every year we have been so close, coming second because we would be missing a member (7 out of the 8 of us would make it for the day). Determined to beat ICS (Illawarra Christian School) who have come first time and time again, I hope our team will win this year.

Thank you for acceptingagreeing to be our "teacher-in-charge" for the day. We did not have much luck with finding other teachers who were free to take us.

I am not sure how to register a team into the competition which is why it would be best to converse with Mr Treleaven on how to do so. He also used to mark the papers, so his experience and dedication to the Decathlon are impactful.

Thanks again, and I hope we can participate in the 2024 tournament.

Kind Regards,

Ronan Gracias