Right before the IB students’ homework pile started to get too high, IB hosted its annual team building event on Tuesday, Sept. 2. Team building is set up with 4 houses, each with distinguished colors: Lancelot (blue), Pendragon (yellow), Percival (red) and Gawain (green). Each house name is named after a knight from King Arthur’s Round Table, connecting to Robinson’s theme of Camelot. All the teams compete against each other in games and challenges.
“It’s obviously heavily influenced by the stuff you see in Harry Potter, but of course, when it comes to the events, the games we have to come up with that,” IB Team Building organizer James Buchanan said.
In the previous years, IB was split into two groups with seniors and sophomores on one day and freshmen and juniors on another. This year, however, all of IB was combined into one day.
“This meant we had to account for a lot more people in the gym and auditorium at once, which connected to all aspects of the day, from the food to the resources for every game,” Gawain Head Teacher Danielle Lucas said.
To help counterbalance this new challenge, this year had student leadership positions.
“So I was a house prefect, and we [8 seniors and 2 juniors] came to school early to set up posters on the doors for each of the house teachers. I personally helped come up with the dance portion of our like the Olympic kind of ceremony thing but as a prefect we helped set up attendance for welcoming people in and were involved in just keeping everything in order. We put a lot of effort into making sure everyone was participating and having fun at the same time,” Gawain Prefect Paige Brigman (’26) said.
After all of IB was sorted into their houses in the gym, the morning activities started. This consisted of a small group dance off, a questionnaire about the IB teachers, decorating the gym to coordinate with the house colors, each house choreographing a dance and making posters to represent their house.
“I think team building went so much better this year, there was a lot more involvement in it. I mean, everyone had Instagram accounts and we had a lot of school spirit. This time teachers were really involved and I actually did enjoy having every grade level all together. When I was at underclassman, I definitely wanted to have an upper classman that I could look up to and get information from. So I thought that was really important,” Lancelot Prefect Mia McCluskey (’26) said.
In the afternoon, all the houses were divided into groups, where they went to different stations to earn more points for their houses. Some of these included marshmallow tower building, chalk drawings, quizzes and other things that represented the IB profile characteristics.
“For us to juggle the numbers of all four classes at once, we needed ten games. Where last year, we only had six. Of course, we wanted to change the games or at least slightly alter them,” Buchanan said.
At the very end of the competition, the House of Gawain was declared the winner. With a tie between Percival and Lancelot in second, and finally Pendragon in third.
“I believe that Gawain’s win can be attributed to one thing: they were hungry for it. After two days of losses last year despite some amazing performances, they were determined to win this year. Being the house with the fewest members was also extremely motivating: each member stepped up to fill in those gaps, and it showed,” Lucas said.
However, this may not be the end of team building for this year. Due to only having one day, there may be plans to have another day in January. As a proud member of the Gawain house, I fully believe that if this were to happen, Gawain would be able to take the crown once more. However, in the end, it’s not only about competition but also about building community.
“I strongly believe that our students, teachers and parents are much closer than they would have been without it [team building] and that is incredibly valuable to our success as a program,” said Lucas.
