“You won’t have any trouble finding our team,” Elaine Yenne told me on the telephone a week before I caught up with her at the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals. “Just look for six 5-1/2 foot chickens.”

       The “chickens” were junior high school boys participating in Odyssey of the Mind, an international competition that challenges students, kindergarten through college, to find creative solutions to bizarre problems. Yenne, a teacher at Parkhill Junior High School in Dallas, served as coach for a team of ninth-graders working on a problem called “Mini Terrain Vehicles.”  They had to design and build several small vehicles that could circumscribe arcs, survive sand traps, release a smaller car carried atop one of the vehicles, flip onto another surface and keep going, and dive off a ramp into a pool of water-yet proceed apace and pop a balloon at the end of each 20-foot obstacle course.  And it all had to be done for less than $90 in materials, and without an iota of adult assistance.

        But chickens?  You thought designing and building trick cars would be creative enough? Obviously you’ve never attended an Odyssey of the Mind competition. And certainly not the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals.

Because in Odyssey of the Mind-or “OM,” as these tournaments are affectionately known to more than a million youthful participants in all 50 states and 20 other countries-there seems to be no limit to the amount of time children are willing to invest or the heights of creativity they are able to achieve.  Electing to solve one of five long-term problems, they work as a team for months, seeking original solutions that will wow the judges.

For those who take first-place honors at local, state, and national competitions, the reward is a chance to compete in the World Finals, a dizzying four-day thinkathon that looks like some kind of kooky cross between science fair, masquerade party, performing arts fest and the Olympics.  “Trying to explain Odyssey of the Mind to someone who’s never seen it,” an OM official told me, “is like trying to explain how to tie your shoes over the telephone.”

      Whatever it is exactly, this thing called Odyssey of the Mind, one truth is evident from watching the 5,000 “OMers” who invaded the campus of Iowa State University in Ames in June 1994 for the World Finals: simply being creative and clever is not enough.  You’ve got to be creative with style.

To the miniature-vehicle builders from Parkhill Junior High School, “style” meant finding a theatrical motif for the six mini-terrain vehicles they cobbled together from wheels, gears, axles, motors, circuit boards and other parts scavenged out of discarded cash registers, copy machines and assorted junk they picked up at a local warehouse.  The cars are about a foot long and, like the boys, they are dressed as chickens.

      “We wanted to come up with a reason to have these cars going down these different roads,” explains Mark Waterston from under his feathery headpiece, “and we thought of the old joke, ‘Why does the chicken cross the road?’”  Decked out as gangly “Big Chick”, Waterston is the star character in a bevy of sight gags and poultry puns that the boys hatched in order to answer the famous question eight different ways, one for each course, or “road,” the cars must traverse.

       The clever shenanigans at one of the stations-entitled “The Flip-Flop”-demonstrate just how much ingenuity is demanded.  Here the team breaks out into a game of baseball.  Their car has been painted to resemble the “San Di-Eggo Chicken,” a major league mascot who dives for balls.  Which is exactly what this vehicle does, upending itself and flopping onto another surface.  The feat is required by the specifications of the problem, and accomplished by an inspired spool-and-thread device that moves the car’s center of gravity as its wheels turn, finally causing it to flip when it reaches an unstable position.  Understand, it rides its second set of wheels straight into the balloon at the end of the run.

       And so it goes, road after road, one chicken joke after another, until the final car has completed its course.  The vehicles have popped five out of the eight balloons, and the flock of 5-1/2 foot chickens takes a final jaunty strut to the wildly enthusiastic cheers (and a few squawks) from the bleachers.  Another eight-minute presentation at the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals is over.

By the end of the week, more than 700 such presentations will be given, each a unique solution to one of the five problems dreamed up by OM’s founder and chief impresario, C. Samuel Micklus.  (His son, Sammy, also takes on the task of devising these challenges.  And Micklus’ wife, Carole, has played a major role in OM from its inception.)  A former professor of technology and design, Micklus believes that the future belongs to those who learn creative-problem-solving skills as children.  The key is what he calls “divergent” thinking.  It is this ability to take mental risks and explore multiple solutions to a problem that is the essential foundation for creativity.  “What problems will today’s second-graders face 20 or 60 years from now?” he asks.  “I don’t know. No one knows because tomorrow’s problems are inconceivable today.  So we have to encourage creativity through divergent thinking and foster the discipline needed to pursue solutions.”

Stolid of face and stolid of build, Sam Micklus looks more like an athlete turned banker than the designer turned professor turned creative-thinking guru that he is.  Growing up in southern New Jersey, he never had an amicable relationship with conventional schooling, and he entertained no notions of higher education before his mother brought a portfolio of his artwork to the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts).  He was the first in his family and one of the first in his neighborhood to attend college, and he graduated with a degree in industrial design.

In 1975, while pursuing a doctorate in education, Micklus was struck by a study showing that teachers prefer less-creative students, and school administrators prefer less-creative teachers.  “I realized this is what I’d been observing in schools all my life,” he says, “but it was still very disturbing.  So I decided to do something about it in my own teaching.”  As a professor at Glassboro State College (now Rowan College) in New Jersey, he assigned creative problem solving in his design class.  One project required the students to create a flotation device that could navigate a half-mile zigzag course across a nearby lake-without spending more than $5.

“They sailed trash cans, paper boats, and milk bottle crafts, but the device I’ll never forget looked like a giant water bug.  It had stiltlike legs attached to inner tubes floating on the water.  The inventor sat on top and pulled a rope that moved the legs together.  When he let go of the rope, the contraption would, in theory, slide across the water.”  A hinged flap below each foot provided one-way resistance.  “Unfortunately, he fell off each time it moved, so he didn’t solve the problem at all, but it was a wonderful example of mental risk-taking.”

In 1978, Micklus took a risk of his won.  He thought it might be fun to challenge high school and junior high school students with similar problems, and groups of children from 28 New Jersey schools came to Glassboro State to present their solutions.  “We were just fooling around,” he says.  “It was only going to be a onetime thing.”  But such creative good fun could not be a onetime thing, and more than 100 teams came the next year.  In 1980, Bill Moyers featured OM-then called “Olympics of the Mind”-in his PBS series Creativity.  OM took off on an exponential growth curve, quickly spreading to schools across the continent and abroad.  Sometimes it is offered only to children in “gifted and talented” programs, a practice Micklus tries to discourage, but usually it is an afterschool activity for everyone, coached by a teacher or a parent.  Now local and state competitions are necessary to pare down the number of contenders at the World Finals.   Last year more than 12,000 schools and one million children worldwide, from Kazakhstan to Australia, participated in Odyssey of the Mind.

“OM fits perfectly with the current climate of business, which is to work as a team to find new, efficient ways to do things,” says Bill Jones, former director of corporate communications for Chevron.  After he retired, Jones took on a volunteer position chairing Friends of OM, a group of advisers that also seeks corporate support.  “Many companies recognize that their most outstanding employees are the risk takers,” he says, “and they are starting to see that children who participate in Odyssey of the Mind have credentials in creativity.”

Early on, Micklus wanted to find a way to honor individuals and teams that took giant mental leaps, uninhibited by fear of failure.  “We’re too quick to reprimand children for making mistakes,” he laments, “and we forget how many great accomplishments came about because someone was willing to try and fail, many times.  Thomas Edison made something like 2,000 attempts at the light bulb before he got it right!”  He remembered the student who had built the floating water bug, then devised an award to encourage the same spirit of unbridled creativity.  He named it the “Ranatra Fusca Award”-after a species of water insects.  In Odyssey of the Mind, the Ranatra is considered a higher honor than first place.

Some schools take up OM as an alternative to science fairs, which typically reward those with the slickest displays-often a sign a parental involvement.  At OM, on the other hand, judges are trained to detect adult intervention, and coaches serve largely as facilitators who keep their teams “on task”-even if it pains them to keep their mouths shut while the children struggle with a problem.  When a team of vehicle builders in Palo Alto, California, needed gear reduction to help one of their miniature cars overcome a bumpy obstacle course, their coach, and engineer, had to bite his tongue.  He kept biting until they invented a system that geared up instead of down.  “These are very bright kids who were born in the computer age.  It’s not their fault, but the just haven’t torn apart enough radios and bicycles and motorcycle engines,” says Bill Abbott, who spent a good part of his childhood getting his hands greasy.   He finally decided they needed to take a field trip-to a hardware store.  “If they ask me, I can teach them principles of mechanics or electricity or how to use a hacksaw.  But I can’t say, ‘What your car needs is lower gears and here’s how to do it.’”  Nor could he suggest fresh batteries on competition day.  “All I could do was smile when they handed me the spare batteries instead of putting them in the cars.”  His smile froze when one of the cars ran out of “gas” halfway up the ramp.

Adults may be frustrated by the no-tell rule, but for children it opens up a world of possibilities.  “When kids do it alone,” says Kris Shearer, who with her husband, Steve, serves as state director for OM in California, “you get something none of us would expect.”  As an example, she points to a fourth-grade girl whose team build balsa wood structures that had to support as much weight as possible.  Not knowing about the advantages of diagonal braces, the girl hit upon a different approach.  “She thought the best way to keep her structure from breaking might be to soften it.  So she soaked the wood in water and coiled it into a spring.  When weights were placed on it, it compressed but didn’t break.”  Unfortunately, the judges had to consider the structure broken when it compressed to the point where the weights rested on the safety bumpers, upright posts in the testing assembly.  But they were so impressed with the novel solution that they awarded her a Ranatra Fusca.

 

    

     “Creative problem solving is only part of it,” says Sam Micklus, walking briskly between buildings on the Iowa State campus.  “We’re trying to teach a way of life.”  He smiles and shouts “Good luck!” to a sprinting dinosaur and a blue-footed booby scampering down the sidewalk.  These hurried creatures are probably on their way to “Furs, Fins, & Feathers,” a problem that requires teams to create a humorous performance depicting the life of an animal from the animal’s perspective.  “To do well in OM, you need teamwork and you need persistence.  How often do kids get involved with projects that take months to complete and require working well together?”
       Working well together was the chief challenge for six fifth-graders from Blue Hills Elementary School in Saratoga, California, who tackled OM’s Illiad problem.  The assignment was to dramatize a scene from Homer’s Illiad and segue into an analogous historical moment from the 20th century, stitching the two together in a seamless eight-minute performance featuring elaborate sets that transform instantly with the change of scene.
        The Blue Hills team had talent aplenty, but patience was another matter.  “At the beginning,” says coach Vicky Evans, “all anyone could say was, ‘Hey, listen to my idea!’   Now they start out with ‘Does anybody have an idea?’”  When one of the children  proposed using a sing-along tape of world history as the context for their production, everyone listened.  The team built props including a giant tape recorder, and composed a minioperetta that fast-forwarded through time, showing a parallel between the Trojan War, when the river Xanthus turns red with blood, and the Exxon Valdez spill, when the Alaskan waters turn black with oil-sung to the tune of “What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor?”  As the spring competition season approaches, they practiced as often as six times a week, and sang their way to the World Finals.
          In addition to cooperation, OM begets confidence and self-esteem.  It is a world of no stigma for individuality, a safe zone for the kinds of children who are ignored or even ridiculed by their peers. “In Odyssey of the Mind, kids are taken seriously by their peers, sometimes for the first time in their lives,” says Mike Bledsoe who, with his wife Jan, coaches a team of students from College Park High School in Pleasant Hill, California.
     The Pleasant Hill team sailed through regional and statewide competitions.  The problem-titled “OM-Believable Music”-called for three original musical instruments that could be played without being touched-all within the context of a skit, of course.  For a musical theme, they adapted TV’s Beverly Hillbillies jingle, but they turned the show’s plot around: instead of striking it rich, the “Pleasant Hillbillies” strike it poor when they lose their fortune in a fire and have to move from city to farm, where they make a comeback and discover that creativity conquers all.  A four-foot-tall pop-up book illustrates the change of scenery as the music rings out on ingenious instruments: a circular “glockenspiel” played by the pecking motions of wooden chickens on a turntable; a “jukebox” powered by cascades of BBs and intoned when the tiny metal balls strike hollow copper pipes on a revolving spindle; and a giant “player-piano” roll driven by a motor from an ice cream maker, sounding its notes when steel bolts come into contact with chimes cut from copper pipe.
Their well-received performance earned them sixth place at the World Finals.
      By midmorning on the last day of World Finals, most of the teams have already strutted their stuff for the judges.  Now they can relax while awaiting the evening award ceremony, and many retreat to shady corners of the campus to trade enameled pins emblazoned with mottos like “Michigan OM-Great Lakes, Great Minds” and “ColoradOM.” 
       But for seven fourth-graders from the A.W.Cox Elementary School in Guilford, Connecticut, half a year of experimentation, discussion, revision, and rehearsal is not quite over yet.  They move their gear into a basement gym in Iowa State’s Physical Education Building. Their long-term problem involves building a balsa wood structure weighing 18 grams (a little more than half an ounce) and standing between 8 and 8-1/2 inches tall-but capable of supporting a large stack of barbell weights.  When the weights finally crush the spindly wooden tower, a Ping Pong ball inside must be released unharmed.  Hence the problem’s name, “Set It Free.”

     Dressed like construction workers in fluorescent orange vests and papier-mache helmets, the five boys and two girls set to work.  With the anxious care of infantrymen handling grenades, Seth Besse and David Ellis, aided by their coach, deftly place 25- and 45-pound weights on the latticed balsa base. (For safety reasons, an adult is permitted to help the children lift the weights.)  Since fall, the team has built and broken dozens of balsa structures in preparation of these eight minutes, studying the points of weakness, refining the design.  Their latest model features four-overlapping X-braces on each side.  At the Connecticut state finals two months ago, a precursor to this design held 660 pounds.

       The level of tension in the room grows with the height of the weight stack.  But Daniel Rubin ignores it.  Sitting to one side, a half-size cello between his knees, a kazoo in his mouth and an electronic keyboard at arm’s length, he strikes up a recognizable tune.  It is “London Bridge is Falling Down.”  Meanwhile, two of his teammates begin to assemble a scaled-up version of the balsa tower.  In construction-worker garb, they mime hammering motions, fastening long plywood slats with Velcro to erect a second tower, this one taller than themselves.

         Slowly, the big structure comes together-and, astonishingly-the small one holds together despite the imposing stack of iron disks that now dwarfs it.  The weight handlers hardly breathe, fearful their respiration could jar the works.  A hush envelops the gym, punctuated only by Daniel’s resonant cello.  London Bridge is falling down, falling down…the weight stack grows…falling down…and grows.

      

 

       The big structure is complete.  Its builders dance around it.  London Bridge is falling down, falling down…the weight crew works, never looking up.  The room is charged with tension.  And the weight stack grows.  Daniel plays furiously, switching from cello to keyboard and back..falling down.  London Bridge is falling…Snap!  Nine hundred pounds of hard black metal demolish the tiny balsa tower.  Jarred by the shock, the Ping-Pong ball rolls off its cradle and out of the assembly.  Spectators gasp, then begin to cheer but stop in midshout.
        As if in echo, the big tower also suddenly tumbles.  One of the children stoops to the floor and lifts a previously unnoticed treasure from the ruins.  It is a papermache sphere, an outsize mimic of the Ping-Pong ball!  To the oohs, ahhs, and general perplexity of the spectators, one boy cleaves the sphere to reveal a very different sort of balsa structure: it has two wings and a rubber-band powered propeller.  He raises the contraption to eye level and gently sets it free.  In slowly ascending arcs, the balsa wood airplane spirals upward, circling the gym in lazy circles.  Five, 10, 12, 13 revolutions, then a descent of equal grace.  The effect is stunning, breathtaking, hypnotic.  Everyone in the room is awed by the odyssey of young minds that has just transformed an engineering problem into a magical performance.
        At the awards ceremony in Hilton Coliseum the energy level is high-voltage.  Very few of these 5,000 charged-up young people will walk away with trophies, but even fewer seem to care.   OM creator Sam Micklus is introduced to the packed house as “a man famous not for the problems he has solved, but for the problems he creates.”  When Micklus tells the OMers they are all winners, it is a statement they truly seem to believe, and the decibel level of their cheers must rival that of any Iowa State basketball game at this site.
       The Cox School fourth-graders are winners in more than one way.  Aside from a trophy for fourth place in the elementary school “Set It Free” division, Daniel Rubin receives an “Outstanding Omer Award” for his talents as “a one-person music machine.”  Minutes later, the team is called to the stage to receive a Ranatra Fusca award.  “Exceptional creativity was shown in the unique and creative way the team integrated the different elements of its performance,” reads the announcer.  “They captured the audience’s attention, and they had fun!”
        

    For all of its educational benefits, I realize, Odyssey of the Mind would be just another after-school program if it weren’t so much fun.  I turn to the boy behind me.  He lacks trophies but certainly not enthusiasm.  “Is OM fun?” I ask.
    “It’s better than fun,” he says.  “It’s amazing. No, it’s OM-azing!”