Meet Jerry. He’s that yellow alpaca in the middle. Meet the other Jerry, the pink alpaca on the end. The green alpaca is also named Jerry. They are all Jerry. Why? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure, but the World Scholar’s Cup, the organization who distributes the Jerries, named them all Jerry.  The World Scholar’s Cup is a not-for-profit organization founded in 2007 by a man called Daniel Berdichevsky. There are six subjects in its curriculum: Science, Arts, Social Studies, History, Literature, and Special Area (which changes every year. Last year it was human relationships, this year it’s unsolved mysteries). WSC is an academic competition for teams of three consisting of six events. Four of them are team events, being the Team Debate, Collaborative Writing, the Scholar’s Challenge, and the Scholar’s Bowl. The other two events are the Debate showcase, where eight of the top debaters are chosen to form a negative and an affirmative team, and the Scholar’s Show, which is pretty much the same as Coffee House. During the team debates, scholars went head to head in a formal, respectful argument to determine who wins and who lollipops (because they don’t call it losing). The Collaborative Writing has scholars write persuasive essays on one of six provided topics, and the Scholar’s Challenge is – well, a challenge. The Scholar’s Bowl is similar to the Challenge, being a multiple choice test, but there is one key difference: the Challenge is individual, whereas the Bowl is a team effort.

The WSC staff have a special ability to drag things out to be way longer than is necessary, so be warned, but they also know how to make it really entertaining (with lots of bad puns, meme references, and funny stories, like Dave.)

This year, two teams from IPS went to the Vancouver Regional Round. Five of the six scholars (Lukas H., Roman B., Beck M., Ethan R., Wylie S. and myself) went into the event with little to no previous knowledge of what would occur at Mulgrave (the host school). They came out of it with global round qualifications and more medals than I’d care to count. And who could forget the stuffed alpacas that are handed out to everyone as a participation award?

Because both teams qualified for the global rounds of WSC, we have the option to attend any of the six global rounds this summer: Beijing, China, Astana/Nursultan, Kazakhstan, Sydney, Australia, Manila, the Philippines, Durban, South Africa, and the Hague (Amsterdam), the Netherlands.

Whether all or none of us move on to go to one of the global rounds, the experiences had at the regional round will be with us forever.

Ailsa R.

Grade 8 Student