WCDS Odyssey of the Mind Goes to the World Finals

A team of students from Westchester Country Day School is competing in the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals this weekend at Michigan State University.

This is the third year in a row a team from Westchester has advanced to the World Finals.

The team of 11^th graders Mallory Atkinson, Abby Keever, Ava Klein, Liv Mueller, Maggie O’Keeffe, Riley Yanez, and 10^th grader Cooper Singer finished in first place at both the Regional Tournament in February and at the State Tournament in March.

At the World Finals, the WCDS team will present solutions to both a “long-term” problem and a “spontaneous” problem. They will be judged on how well their solutions meet a variety of criteria, including technical specifications, creativity, teamwork and style.

The team has worked on its solution to the long-term problem “Pirates and the Treasure” throughout the school year building a vehicle that performs various tasks and designing a creative performance that incorporates the use of the vehicle into a story with characters, costumes and set. In their solution, a football team, the Buccaneers, use the vehicle to combat a three-headed referee monster and retrieve the championship trophy for the coach.

The spontaneous problem will require them to think and respond within a time limit to a verbal or hands-on task, such as improvising parts of a story or building a structure.

“To prepare for competition, they met almost every Sunday from October through March, and sometimes on Fridays and Saturdays as well,” said Raegan Atkinson, director of college guidance and advisor for the team. “Odyssey requires that kind of unwavering commitment and dedication, so I am always very proud of and impressed by the students who choose to participate.”

Odyssey of the Mind is a creative problem-solving program that teaches students to think differently while creating solutions to open-ended problems. The worldwide program presents new problems each year for teams to work together on solving. These problems appeal to a range of interests and include building items, creating devices, or giving performances. Solutions to these problems involve students in using ideas from science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM). Competitions reward creativity and thinking outside the box.