Your Problems Solved: FPSPI

By Bonnie Pan

I am an avid participant in an annual competition known as Future Problem Solving, or FPS for short. If you’re unfamiliar with FPS, I encourage you to look up more information from the website, www.fpspi.org, because it is a great opportunity to practice writing and creative thinking skills.

My oh-so-talented team recently placed second in the Washington state affiliate round, which was held from April 13th to the 15th. However, our win was only a tiny portion of an extensive list of victories by the Bellevue school district.

The FPS process consists of six steps- finding challenges, selecting the most pertinent one, finding solutions to that problem, creating a set of criteria by which to judge the solutions, picking the best solution, and writing an action plan for it.

Odle Middle School, coached by Debby Benzinger, received every award from second to fifth place in the middle division, beating out teams from all over Washington state, not to mention Oregon and Montana. Way to go, Odle!

Interlake High School, whose teams have captured every single first place victory in both the Middle and Senior divisions since the conception of the club, again did expectably well, bringing home the first place award for the Middle Division and the first to third place awards for the Senior division, in addition to two individuals each winning the Senior and Middle divisions.

Now, the fun doesn’t stop here. The first place teams and individuals from the senior and middle divisions get to go to Wisconsin for the International Conference to compete against FPSers from all over the world, including teams from Korea, England, and Australia.