Last Saturday I participated in my first World Affairs Challenge (WAC).   The University of Denver hosted the annual event.  

WAC  is appealing as an extracurricular event because it shifts our focus to the global community.  The topic that our team chose to focus on was:

Human Rights - Do human rights shift and change based on where people live? How are rights protected, promoted, or disregarded?
Specifically - Human trafficking

WAC is made up of 3 different events, all of which are tabulated into a score:

• The Formal Presentation (FP) 60%
• The Global Awareness Quiz (the Quiz) 30%
• The Collaborative Question (CQ) 10% 

Sadly, the Thornton High School Sophomore team didn’t place in the top 3. 

Now that we have a better understanding of the format, we plan to do much better next year.

The Formal Presentation: A 10‐15 minute presentation that communicates research findings and related solutions. The presentation can be really creative - and should demonstrate an understanding of the topic’s complexities and proposes reasonable solution(s).

The Quiz:  30 minutes to complete the 50‐question, multiple‐choice GlobalAwareness Quiz, which encompasses events, institutions, and people in the national and international news.

The Collaborative Question: Participants are assigned to new teams with peers from other schools and they receive a “real world” question, simulation, or problem. They must come to consensus on a response and present their answer to event judges, who ask questions and have a dialogue with the students.  (30‐40 minutes)