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I just received an email (on an adoption discussion group) from a Colorado mother whose son is in elementary school and was part of a team that just won second place in the state Odyssey of the Mind competition.

She now wants to send her son to the World's competition in Washington DC at the end of this month, but the team needs to raise 12K for the event, plus each team member needs to come up with 2K.

If true, this is quite pricey, no?

Is anyone familiar with Odyssey of the Mind?

All I know is that Odyssey of the Mind events are rapidly replacing science fairs -- events where kids run/defend experiments and focus on learning the scientific method. My own experience is that science teachers don't like science fairs. Not sure why.

I am not up to date on how it is being run now, but I participated in it for most of my elementary and junior high years (Back when it was called Olympics of the Mind before the IOC forced the name change). The concept is really neat, teams of kids pick amongst a list of challenges, nearly all of them involve some sort of dramatic component in service of the presentation of your solution, there is usually some sort of engineering component, a time limit component and budget components. There is no science fair type hypothesis testing per se.

By way of an example: One year my team picked a problem in which we had to build a two person vehicle with a budget of under $100 there were restrictions as to method of propulsion (I think perhaps, based on my memory of our final design, the restriction was that it had to be a pulling motion only). This vehicle had to navigate a course and pick up various flags, and neither person in the vehicle was allowed to touch the ground or leave the vehicle. In addition there had to be a cohesive theme and presentation. We chose to do a trip around the world picking up world flags while presenting music from each country. The competition is fairly intense and the preparation takes months.

There are also competitions for building the strongest balsa wood bridge. Building an enclosure that will protect an egg that is dropped. There is also a section where the whole team must walk into a room completely unprepared and come up with numerous solutions to a problem or build things with random objects in a short amount of time.

12K for a trip to DC for a team of what 6 kids plus chaperones for I don't know how many days plus fees. Sounds a bit high but not entirely out of the ballpark.

As far as educational value I would put it on par with a science fair, but with a completely different means to a completely different end. There is some overlap, but I don't think either one is any sort of reasonable substitute for the other. Unless OM has changed radically since I was in 8th grade.

Was that long winded enough for everyone?

P.S.
Thank you for your post Linda, you brought back alot of really cool memories!

I am in the same situation and Micah. I did it for one year in 8th grade and I too had to make a vechile. OM is not very scientific based as the science fair but there are some good things like trying to tie Engineering with Theater. Also we had a bike with basicly a rubberband but there were some groups that had like a go cart. My point is the rules can be very loose and not everyone is on the same playing field.

I do not think OM is a replacement for Science fair projects they are very different and teach kids very different subjects.