Five teams of students from Westchester Country Day School will compete in the Odyssey of the Mind state competition on March 22 in Jacksonville, North Carolina.

The school is sending teams of students from grades 3-5, 6-8 and 9-12 to participate in the competition. These teams all placed in the North Carolina Northern Region competition in Marion, North Carolina, in February.

At the state tournament, the WCDS teams will present solutions to both long-term and spontaneous problems along with schools across North Carolina. They will be judged on how well their solutions meet a variety of criteria, including technical requirements, creativity, teamwork and style.

The teams have prepared their solutions to the long-term problems for several months. These solutions include creative and entertaining performances that include references to classic literature, student-made mechanical animals and astronomy. As they worked on their solutions, they developed a story, wrote scripts, and made props and costumes from recycled materials for their performance while staying on budget and sticking to the requirements presented in the problem.

The spontaneous problem will require them to think and respond as a team within a time limit to a verbal or hands-on task, such as improvising parts of a story or building a structure. The details of the problem are not known until their competition time.

“The students’ dedication to problem-solving with creativity, communication, critical thinking and collaboration will help them be the leaders of our future,” said Deb Tuggle, teacher and coordinator for the Odyssey of the Mind program at WCDS.

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.