Odyssey of the Mind is a creative problem-solving programme for schoolchildren all over the world. To participate, all you need is a team of up to seven kids, a school sponsor, a willing coach, a working space that can be messed up, gaffer (duct) tape, and lots of pizza.

What it Really is

Odyssey of the Mind was conceived more than 20 years ago, from ideas used by Dr Sam Micklus in his classes at Rowan University in New Jersey. He would give his classes assignments such as 'Create a vehicle to navigate over water, using less than $20-worth of materials' and score them on the creativity of their creation as much as how well it worked. Thus, a boat that worked perfectly could be scored lower than, say, a giant hamster wheel-like contraption that still had a few kinks to work out. This became so popular that outside people wanted to participate, and eventually Odyssey of the Mind was born.

Now, Odyssey of the Mind is a worldwide programme, and has been altered quite a bit from Dr Micklus' original industrial design classes. Children compete in teams of up to seven people, in four separate divisions, which are divided by age as follows: Division I-under 12 years old, Division II- under 15 years old, Division III- under 19 years old, and Division IV- College. You compete in the division in which your oldest team-member belongs. The competition consists of three separately-scored parts, long-term, spontaneous, and style, and the combined weighted total of those three parts becomes the team's final score for the competition. All parts must be done by the team alone with no assistance from any other people.

Long-term Competition

This part of the competition is worked on all year. With the registration pack that every member gets (usually one school buys one membership, along with the right to have one team per problem per division) comes a copy of each of these problems. There are five of them plus one non-competitive primary problem for the youngest children. The problems all vary from year to year, but in general there is one 'Classics' problem which usually centres around art, music or mythology, one problem that involves building a structure out of balsa wood to hold weight, one where you build a vehicle, one that is even more technical, building things that might range from objects that morph on their own to musical instruments that are played without touching them to a system to deliver mail, and one that is mainly performance-based.

Once a team chooses their problem, they begin work on it. All team-members work on it throughout the year, but only five can perform the solution. In general, the solution will be a short skit, less than eight minutes, conceived, written, and performed by just the team. They have to come up with the idea, work in all the elements required by the problem, make props, costumes, and scenery, set up the stage, and perform their solution with absolutely no assistance from others.

This doesn't mean that you can't have help learning to do things, just that you have to do them on your own. For example, you can have a local sewing expert teach everyone to sew, but you can't have him do any actual sewing on props or costumes. More difficult, all the ideas have to come directly from the team. Nobody else can make suggestions that are used

Other than the restrictions of the problem, the teams are on their own. Each problem has a general theme, and more specific requirements. If one of the problem was about alien civilisations, then the requirements could be to create a race of aliens, have some of the team discover it, and show examples of alien art and music, and possibly create a vehicle to transport the team to or around the alien planet. The actual problems are a bit more complex than that, but have the same basic outline and everything must fit into an eight-minute sketch. There are also cost restrictions. These vary from problem to problem, but usually the value of all the materials used in the solution (with exceptions such as glasses or hearing aids or wheelchairs for handicapped team-mates) is not allowed to exceed $125US.

The required elements are all scored. Some are scored purely on if they're present or not. Others are scored subjectively, on either creativity or how well they are made or done. The long-term competition is worth 200 points out of a possible 350 for the entire competition.

Spontaneous Competition

In this part, teams are given a short problem at the competition, and have to come up with solutions after two to five minutes thinking/working time. This is not to say that the team can't prepare, just that they don't ever know the problem in advance. In this competition as well, only five people can compete, but they do not have to be the same five people, and are chosen after the team learns what type of problem it has; verbal, hands on, or a combination of the two.

Verbal problems are judged on creativity and number of answers given, usually. In most cases, the team is read a problem and is given one minute to think of the most number of creative responses, and then has two minutes to give those answers, members taking turns to give an answer. A problem could be to name things that are red, and members would then think of as many of those as possible. Scoring typically gives one point for each common response, and three points for anything deemed humorous or creative by the judges. Examples of common responses would be things like stop signs and apples. Creative ones could be that Mars is the red planet, newspapers are read or that Orville Redenbacher's is a brand of popcorn. Note: Don't get too creative with your responses. If you're making references to some of your team's inside jokes, or getting just plain weird, the judges aren't going to understand your answers and won't give creative points for them. Sometimes you're given props for a problem too. You could have a picture of fish and be asked to say something about it, or be given a fork and a lump of clay and either say something about them or show what you might do with them.

Hands-on problems are exactly that, hands-on. These tend to be judged on teamwork and functionality as much as creativity. Often, they entail building a structure out of unlikely materials, straws, index cards, and string, for example, and having it hold weight or bridge a gap. Here, you would have maybe five minutes to plan and build it. Other kinds involve giving the team a set of materials, perhaps a bandana, some yarn, a tennis ball, and a picture of the Pope, and having half the team use those as signals to tell the other half in what order to stack coloured blocks. In this case you would have probably three minutes to agree on the system and two to stack the blocks.

The third kind is just a combination of the first two. A team may be given a light bulb and be told to improvise or tell everybody something about it, and then have to protect the lightbulb from breaking when dropped onto a hard surface from seven feet using an envelope, a piece of string, a mailing label, a rubber band, and a sheet of paper¹.

This part of the competition is worth up to 100 points out of the available 350.

Style Competition

This part of the competition is almost an offshoot of the long-term part. It has separate judges, and the style elements can't be scored for everything else, but the elements are part of the long term presentation. For style, five things are scored, the fifth one always being the overall effect of the performance. One to three of the other elements are specified in general terms, saying that the team has to be scored on the creativity of one costume or the appearance of its membership sign, a sign that gives the team's school and membership number. The rest of the elements are left free so that the team can have things judged that they feel are particularly creative or well done. Each of the five elements receives up to ten points, so that style is worth up to 50 points of the total score.

Competitions, Scoring, and Whatnot

There are three basic levels of competition, in the United States at least. All teams from a particular school or membership are eligible to compete in the regional competition, usually held at the end of February. Depending on population, one region is made up of one to three counties. The winners of each problem and division at regionals are eligible to compete in the State Finals, generally held in the middle of March. Those winners are eligible to compete in the World Finals (no US national competition) Memorial Day weekend, along with the winning teams from the rest of the world. Division IV (college) teams do not compete in Regional or State competitions, just the World Finals.

Winners are determined by the weighted total of their scores for all the problems. This means that the winner of each portion is given the highest number of points possible, and every other score is changed by what percentage it was from the original top score to what percentage it is of the maximum score. If a final score is less than a full point below the one above it, than those two teams tie for their final placing.

Awards

Along with the placement awards (first through third places receive ribbons and trophies), a few other special awards are given.

• The Outstanding OMER Award is given to individuals or teams who have showed an astonishing amount of helpfulness, teamwork, or perseverance. This is the award that is given to the team that performs even though their scenery was lost because the truck went off the road in a freak accident before the competition, the people who lend materials to a team whose props broke 30 seconds before they were scheduled to perform, or someone who was just generally helpful to everybody all day long.

• The Renatra Fusca Creativity Award is the highest award given for Odyssey of the Mind because it awards ultimate creativity. This one has a bit of history behind it. In Dr Micklus' original design class, the students were given the problem to make something to transport you across water. One student came up with a contraption that was supposed to walk on water. He sat on top of two leg-like things with flat bases, and he held ropes that let these bases either flap underwater or pull up and sit on the surface. This method was very much like that used by water spiders, classification Renatra fusca. Unfortunately, the vehicle didn't quite work but it was such an original idea that the award was named after it. It is the highest honour that a team or individual can receive, and teams who get this award usually advance to the next level of competition regardless of their final standings.

The Coach

This is not a job for the faint-hearted - this individual is in charge of pulling the team together. The coach's duties can include deciding upon team-members, scheduling meetings, organising brainstorming sessions, buying or taking people to buy materials and arranging practice for the spontaneous competition as well as keeping a group of children off of each others' throats. Coaches often have to put up with having their houses made uninhabitable for the month before competitions while team-members work there to create and refine their props. They attend all the meetings, make sure the team is register on time, and in general offer tons of support and advice. These people are saints.

The Dark Side

While Odyssey of the Mind is a wonderful programme, it has had its share of problems. A few years ago, there was a huge uproar and court battle going on. The Odyssey of the Mind corporation was a non-profit organisation owned by a for-profit corporate Creative Competitions, Incorporated, which sells creative problem-solving materials to educators, for the most part. The uproar came when people realised that there were people making profits from their beloved Odyssey of the Mind, which was supposedly a non-profit organisation, and especially that CCI was using logos and the nickname 'OM' from Odyssey of the Mind. There was a lot of fury and it all got very complicated, but in the end some of the people who objected to the profit part formed a new, definitely non-profit problem solving competition called Destination ImagiNation, and something happened with CCI and Odyssey of the Mind, so that each side got to use some of the trademarks and no-one was allowed to use the name OM.

What really happened was that a bunch of adults were fussing at each other, and the children were all getting upset because there was a good chance that there would be no Odyssey of the Mind programme at all that year, which was what Destination ImagiNation was initially started to prevent. Eventually the flames died down, but membership in Odyssey of the Mind dropped, partly due to controversy and partly due to regions that decided to support Destination ImagiNation, but now both programmes are thriving and the children are happy.