2008 Woodie Awards
An Odyssey of Creativity
Ben Penn
Issue date: 6/5/08 Section: News
|
"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.
Submit a letter to the editor or post a comment below.
Be the first to comment on this story