Mental Sports Olympiad 2020/2021

Hello, The new season of the Mental Sports Olympiad is starting! The end of the previous season was a bit chaotic - since schools were closed in the spring, we decided to deliver the medals and cups to the schools only at the end of August. Hopefully, all students will have received their medals by today. We are starting this season with several updates: 1) Vint.ee has a new design Most of the content pages have been moved to the new design. Most recently, the same forum and the events calendar are here. Probably by the end of the year, these pages will also have a new (mobile-friendly) design. Since logging into the portal has also changed, it is important that students familiarize themselves with the new design before the first day of the competition! 2) Vint.ee has become multilingual In the context of the Mental Sports Olympiad, this is not so important - rather, foreign visitors will now understand that such a competition is taking place here. Perhaps some neighboring country wants to organize a similar competition for its school students in the future. To be clear: we are not making the competition for Estonian schools international. 3) This year, a fifth competition area will be added: Crossword solving! We have been thinking about a fifth competition area for several years, this year we decided - crossword solving tournaments will be held on Fridays. Why crosswords? * Solving crosswords is useful for developing young people's vocabulary. * Solving crosswords is inherently different from playing board games (and also from solving sudoku), which is why it makes the entire competition more diverse and perhaps brings new interested parties to the competition. * Since we allow the use of external help when solving crosswords (Google search or online spelling dictionaries), it develops young people's information-seeking skills. * Crosswords are also allowed to be solved by trying, which is why logical thinking must also be used when solving. 4) Trainer functionality In the spring, we will develop trainer functionality, which will allow you to easily create user accounts in Vint and organize tournaments. We also offer this opportunity to all teachers: if you want to organize intra-school tournaments or come to solve sudoku or crossword puzzles with your students from time to time, write to [email protected] 5) Introducing Mind Sports in Schools For the first time, we are offering the opportunity to invite us to schools to talk about Mind Sports, the vint.ee portal, or IT in general. All associated costs will be covered by the Estonian Mind Sports Association. If you are interested, please write to [email protected] The competition schedule and instructions can be found on the Mind Sports Olympiad page. We also created a separate page where you can see all the tournaments taking place during the academic year: https://www.vint.ee/et-ee/mso/tournaments/2020 We wish all old and new competitors a successful Mind Games Olympiad season! Best wishes, Marten Meikop President of the Estonian Mind Games Association Founder of Vint.ee