Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 30, 1993 TAG: 9309010279
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Thousands of kids took such a journey this year, as in past years, in Odyssey of the Mind competitions across the United States and in 17 other countries. Odyssey of the Mind is an educational competition that rewards the very things education these days must reward: teamwork, problem-solving and creativity.
Among the participants this year was a handful of students from Southwest Virginia whose odyssey of exploration and discovery took them to world-class competition at the University of Maryland, where they did very well, indeed.
Placing fifth in the world - in the f+iworld,o mind you - were elementary-school division teams from George Washington Carver in Salem and Glen Cove in Roanoke County. Placing seventh in the world in the middle-school division was Andrew Jackson Middle School in the city of Roanoke. Placing 19th in the world in the high-school division was Lord Botetourt High School.
To get some idea of how impressive these standings are, it may help to know that there were 150 teams just in this region of Virginia this year. Each of the four teams that placed at the world level had competed against 15 to 20 teams regionally to make it to the state competition. Each competed against about a dozen teams at the state level to make it to the world competition.
At the world level, there were more than 700 teams, with more than 50 in each competition. Overall, more than 7,000 students were there - and together they had beaten out tens of thousands from around the world just to get that far.
People too often have their priorities wrong - putting sports above academics, for example. And sometimes, people in this region are prone to put themselves down. Southwest Virginia a hotbed of competitive creativity? You bet - just ask OM participants.
To get some idea of how much fun their odyssey must have been, it may help to know the kinds of problems the kids worked on, and how much imagination went into their solutions. They got to choose from among five problems, most of which had some technical component. They not only had to solve the problem, but present the solution in a creative, thought-provoking way.
Both the Carver and Jackson teams, for example, chose a problem called ``Which End Is Up.'' The idea was to create something with 18 grams of balsa wood that would hold as much weight as possible. Both teams built projects that held 790 pounds, but they were very different.
The Carver team came up with a motif centering around a little boy's birthday and a lesson about listening to directions. When he didn't listen to the directions and opened his present incorrectly, a blob appeared and sent him to a world turned upside down, where everything that had been black was white, and everything that had been white was black. He had to follow a set of clues to get back home.
Jackson's team incorporated the notion of racism in its scenario, which involved blue people and yellow people. A musically gifted blue girl was admitted to a yellow school, where she was ostracized. The team's structure showed how weights are placed on people because of the prejudices they face in the world.
All of the projects required not only scientific understanding and technical know-how, but talents for such tasks as writing dialogue, doing choreography, building sets. Team members each brought his or her own gifts to developing the solution, and worked together to draw on everyone's abilities.
The kids, mind you, not their teachers or parents, came up with the concepts and spent in some cases hundreds of hours preparing for the competition. Not only did they use their own creativity, they saw how many and varied the solutions can be to the same problem when they went head-to-head against other teams.
All the students who take part in OM, not just those who score the most points, enjoy such payoffs, and should be a source of pride for their families, schools and communities. For the four regional teams that went on to world competition this year, there is an added glow of achievement. Their odyssey turned into quite a trip.
Memo: ***CORRECTION***