Jeani Taliaferro and Lynne Harris, who coach the Nease High School Future Problem Solvers teams, proudly announced to local Historic City News reporters that their students recently took 2nd place at state competition; earning them a prestigious invitation to compete at the FPS International Competition on the campus of Iowa State University next month.
Future Problem Solvers was founded by creativity pioneer, Dr. E. Paul Torrance. The competition stimulates critical and creative thinking skills, and encourages students to develop a vision for the future — while they develop teamwork, research, analysis, communication, synthesis and evaluation skills.
“These skills are applied to situations that are futuristic but oriented to real life,” Taliaferro told Historic City News. “The competitive aspects of FPS are fun, but benefits include learning a process that can be used throughout the student’s life.”
During the state competitions, Nease won in the most competitive category: Senior Global Issues Problem Solving. Only the top two teams in each state receive invitations.
The 13-student team at Nease includes:
- Drashti Brahmbhatt
- Shambhavi Khanna
- Lucas Sanders
- Molly Beman
- Adam Domingoes
- Ronak Kundalia
- Laura Londono
- Schayne Fox
- Atharva Taiwade
- Gabby Castello
- Tala Mansoun
- Shaan Khosla
- Aaron Lemos
The group meets every Friday morning to learn and perfect the six-step problem solving process that is used to confront global issues and write booklets for competitions.
This year’s topics for the future scenarios included:
- Impact of Social Media
- Processed Foods
- Propaganda
- Enhancing Human Potential
The topic for the international conference will be “Intellectual Property”.
The 2015 Future Problem Solving Program International Conference will be held in Ames, Iowa, at Iowa State University, from June 10 – June 14. Competition is limited to a select group of academic problem solvers invited to the prestigious international conference each year. A total of over 250,000 students participate in the program. Taliaferro says the Nease team anticipates that they will face over 2,200 outstanding creative problem solving champions from Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, Turkey, Guatemala, United Kingdom, Qatar, South Africa, Switzerland, Thailand and most states within the USA.
© 2015 Historic City News contributed photograph by Jeani Taliaferro
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