Coffee cups and café culture feature in winning video
A Cairns secondary school has taken out CQUniversity’s hotly-contested School Business Challenge, charming judges with their creative café approach to the competition.
Complete with coffee cups and in a café setting, St Augustine’s College Team 2’s presentation wowed the judges and took out the coveted award ahead of runners-up Emmaus College from Rockhampton.
Four finalists – including a second team from St Augustine’s College and one from Bundaberg North High School – competed in the grand final where they were tasked with a challenging case study based on a café business and were required to submit their findings in a video format to judges.
The judging panel comprised representatives from competition sponsors Chartered Accountants, Australia & New Zealand, PVW Partners Accountants and Advisors and Grant Thornton.
The finalists were judged on three criteria: correct calculations; innovative and sustainable recommendations; and professional and easy-to-follow presentations.
CQUniversity’s Deputy Dean – Learning and Teaching for the School of Business and Law, Associate Professor Anthony Weber said the winners impressed the judges by presenting their findings in an actual café.
“Feedback from the judges said that the decision to present in an actual café with actual coffee cups was innovative in itself,” Assoc Prof Weber explained.
“However, they were also praised by their use of graphics to demonstrate their understanding of key concepts.”
The School Business Challenge attracted record numbers this year with 162 students from 40 teams from 23 secondary schools from throughout Queensland competing in the initial round of the competition.
Quiz master Gerard Ilott said the competition tested a range of subject matter from the fields of accounting, business, legal studies and general knowledge, and allowed students to see how what they learn at school fed into the real world.
“This year’s grand final winners received ‘bragging rights’, along with a trophy, prize money and generous scholarships to study at CQUniversity.”
Transcript
Tonight we have some 40 teams competing they're in Cairns Townsville Mackay Rockhampton as you can see and Bundaberg so a big takeup and um I think these kids are going to be in for a good night we're just testing um some knowledge especially some general knowledge and it helps the helps the students see you know how what they learn at school actually feeds into the real world and they start to see things in context we have four rounds of quizzes all multi-choice and so the rounds are we we'll be starting with accounting which is based on mostly the grade 11 curriculum uh then business some grade 11 some grade 12 legal studies which is uh for the grade 10 so we have grade 10 students here as well and of course the general knowledge my favorite tonight the uh the the winners for three regions so we have the Northern the Central and the Bundaberg Wide Bay Region uh the winners get into our second round and that's what we're doing differently this year so I've sent their teachers a small case study based on some business decisions a cafe owner has to make they're going to have to do a little bit of analysis and videotape a short presentation on what they would recommend the cafe owner does and we'll have a panel of of local business people uh evaluate that and they will decide the winner for the the overall winner for 2024 we came forth last year so we're setting an expectation for us to do well again this year so hope we're just hoping we just need confidence and it's 50/50 I guess no oh the winner gets of course um bragging rights they get the trophy uh they'll get some prize money and um they get some generous scholarships to come and study with us
