Brains Battle at Second Annual Brain War

Brains Battle at Second Annual Brain War

Brain War • • • Photo by Meagan Wiederman

The second annual Brain War Competition, a fundraiser at the Discovery Centre on Barrington St, began at 9:30am. 40 teams of four brain warriors waited in the McNally Theater at St. Mary’s University as team leaders brought the teams to the Loyola theatre and accessory lecture halls to begin their challenge.

Brain War is waged through a rotation of 25 three-minute short tasks and five 25 minute long tasks, scoring points on their performance in the areas of science technology, math, art, music and engineering. The day, as promised, was a six hour intellectual, emotional, and creative marathon. Returning champions, Jasico sound engineering company, describe the event as a “true war of intellectuals.”

By 3 pm, the announcement of the finalists was a welcome breather, after hours of rigorous testing and intellectual challenges. In McNally theatre, of the 40 teams, CBCL1 entered the finals in 1st place, followed by Jasico sound engineering, the high school team Darwinian Creation, Pathways to Education, and finally Dalhousie’s integrated major team, Deflate Gate.

The finalists each received a celebrity brain to compete with in a presentation to an audience of nearly 200. During the finals each of the teams received a unique scenario of a medical problem facing in the individual which they would design technology to resolve. Scenarios included a professional football player who was disoriented by noise; a singer who felt as if she was levitating and with had no perception of high pitched notes; a student who could not speak loudly, see clearly, nor hear well; an archeologist who had no sense of touch, and an interior designer with no sense of shape size or distance, respective to the teams.

By the end of the finals, Dalhousie’s own Deflate Gate took the trophy. The Darwinian Creations held second, the highest ranking of a high school team in the history of brain war yet. Jasico, last year’s champions, placed third, happy at their repeat top five performance and ecstatic at the students success in the top two positions. CBCL and Pathways tied for a sound fourth place finish.

Overall the fundraiser succeeded in further financing the Discovery Center’s plan to build a waterfront center, which would feature a creative space for young inventors to work in. While construction of this building has already begun, the full $20 million has yet to be raised for completion of the project in 2016. The Brain War fundraiser plans to continue to finance this project and will continue with the third annual Brain War in 2016.