“Share the magic of P.A.!” shouted Jessie Wagenhoffer, 13, and Brigid Donlon, 12, Odyssey of the Mind World Finals competitors. And the two, attempting to attract people to their self-designed miniature golf hole at the creativity festival in Eppley Recreation Center’s west gym on Monday, had a trick up their sleeves.
“There’s wizards involved,” explained Donlon, adorned in a purple costume.
The creativity festival, which Wagenhoffer and Donlon attended, was one part of the three-day Odyssey of the Mind World Finals, an event hosted by the university for the seventh time in the creativity competition’s 29-year history. The event brought nearly 20,000 out-of-towners to the campus, flooding the university’s academic buildings, dining halls and dorms.
Elementary school through college-aged participants – comprising 846 teams from 15 countries – applied their creativity through problem-solving in five categories, after having placed high in regional and state competitions and scoring a spot in the world finals.
The teams of up to seven participants, 711 of which were from the United States, had spent months preparing solutions to problems in the following categories: Odyssey Road Rally, in which teams built vehicles; DinoStories, in which teams explained their theories on how dinosaurs became extinct through a skit; Classics … Those Wonderful Muses, skits about Greek muses and how they inspired others; Tee Structure, using 18 grams of balsa wood and glue to design a structure that can support as much weight as possible; and The Eccentrics!, performances in which teams come up with solutions to global problems.
And for the various categories, creativity was key. In a Muses skit performed in the Armory’s lecture hall Monday, one team prepared a performance in which two muses competed for supremacy, with one muse dressed in traditional ancient Greek garb, while the other, with strings of CDs dangling from her dress, only spoke in song lyrics and represented the new wave of muses.
“Anything you can do I can do better,” sang one muse to mild laughter from the assembled crowd of parents and other supporters, as judges sitting in the front row took scrupulous notes.
It is examples like this that make Sam Micklus, the World Finals host and the founder of Odyssey of the Mind, beam with pride.
Micklus took a break from signing copies of his book, The Spirit of Creativity, to talk about the growth of the program over the past three decades.
“The Odyssey of the Mind started quite small; it was just going to be a one-time thing,” Micklus said, sitting in the ERC’s west gym. “And now it’s gotten to a point where there are not many universities big enough to handle us.”
Micklus, who the children call “Dr. Sam,” said the university is one of about 10 in the country that can handle the program’s size requirements.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the university is already scheduled to host the World Finals again in 2011, according to Susan Warren, an associate director for Conferences and Visitor Services.
Warren, whose department coordinated all the activities around the campus for the group, said the university accommodated nearly 8,000 finals participants in campus housing and issued 17,000 tickets for Tuesday night’s closing ceremonies at Comcast Center.
“Odyssey of the Mind is by far the largest program that we have ever hosted,” Warren said.
Vice President for Student Affairs Linda Clement said the university hosts Odyssey of the Mind to recruit potential students and to raise finances.
“It generates a lot of revenue for the campus and the surrounding community,” Clement said. “We can fill up our residence halls for this program, and then our students who are living in the residence halls get their costs defrayed.”
But though the World Finals participants seemed to enjoy flocking to Cold Stone, Ratsie’s, Chipotle and other walking-distance eateries, their College Park location was secondary when compared to the challenges they faced from Sunday through Tuesday.
At 8 a.m. Tuesday, several hundred children gathered outside the UMUC Conference Center and prepared to begin the Spontaneous Event, considered the most difficult and nerve-racking of all the competitions because, unlike the other five long-term problems in which teams had months to prepare their solutions, there was no time to prepare for this one.
“Good morning. Do you know why you are here?” asked an Odyssey of the Mind official to the group of about 20 teams standing in parallel single-file lines, with their coaches behind them.
“To have fun!” yelled one child.
“To be awesome!” responded another.
The official told the teams to let out a loud yell in order to release their energy before they had to sit inside and be quiet, as students “can’t talk or laugh when anyone else is talking” during the “business-like” Spontaneous Event, said Gaby Anparan, 10.
Anparan and her teammates from Liberal, Kan., understood the importance of the Spontaneous Event, but they said they preferred the less restrictive, wilder elements of the World Finals.
“I like the crazy things we have to do,” Anparan continued. “We wrote a song named Bananabees, we made costumes out of sheets, and we painted our skin a lot.”
And while winning was important, participants said, having a good time was just as high on their priority list.
“We don’t really want to be competitive because you want to make friends, and you often make friends pin-trading,” said Brooke Linendoll, 11, of Salem, N.Y. Linendoll then ran off before quickly reappearing to showcase a towel filled with a variety of multi-colored pins, some of which were acquired from other teams. Pin-trading is a traditional part of Odyssey of the Mind, and the university even printed thousands of their own – decorated with images of some of the Testudo statues found around the campus – for the Finals.
And friendliness between groups often takes precedence over their standings at the end, Micklus said.
“I’d be the worst judge. I’d give them all 200 points,” he said. “When you watch the teams compete, everybody applauds, and the ones applauding are the opponents.”
While approval from the crowd and judges is nice, one 10-year-old participant walking out of his Spontaneous Event had other priorities.
“We just did it,” said Andrew Tobin of the Orinda, Calif., team. “Now it’s party time.”
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