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Odyssey takes Saratoga students to Michigan

By Michele Tjin

It's like the Olympics, but for the mind.

Students from Saratoga's Sacred Heart School will take on teams from Kazakhstan and Germany to test their creative problem-solving skills and on-the-spot thinking ability. Along the way, there will be plenty of international camaraderie and lots of pin trading.

A team from Sacred Heart received top marks in its age division in the state competition of Odyssey of the Mind, a contest that encourages out-of-the-box thinking. The Saratoga team will travel to the world finals in Lansing, Mich., May 23-26. Odyssey of the Mind, which has been around for nearly 30 years, asks teams to pick one of three problems to work on long-term and resolve it with a creative solution.

"I knew that we were in the top six at the state competition, but I didn't think we would get first," said Saratoga resident Alex Murphy, a fifth-grader.

Alex and her teammates--fifth-graders AnnaClaire Marley, Maddie Miller and Shannon Carte and fourth-graders Tyler Morales, Clay Kellinger and David Lucas--wrote a skit with a complex setup about animals taking an airplane ride. They were asked to come up with a situation in which a self-centered character takes advantage of others three times. They were given five pages of criteria that they had to include in the skit.

"It takes a lot of work," AnnaClaire said. "We practiced two hours on the weekends. We worked on it from November to March, and as it got closer, we had after-school practice."

For four months, the students, who didn't all know each other well in the beginning, worked on their skit, argued with each other, made compromises and refined their work to make it better. They learned that their efforts parallel what goes on in the grown-up world.

"My son was asking me questions, like, 'Is this what you do at work?' " said parent Bill Kellinger of Saratoga. "I thought this is almost exactly what work is. You're put into a mix of people you didn't set out to be with. You're given a job description with not a lot of instructions, and you're judged on results."

The students took seriously the no-parent-help rule. Adults are allowed only to drive them around or teach them a new skill, such as sewing, that they could use for their skit, they said. The hand-drawn cardboard set reflects the children's handiwork, with their representation of an airline cabin.

"The biggest reward is the process," coach Denise Murphy said. "You see kids give and take and respect each other's talent. They come to the point where they discover something greater together than what they could have done on their own."

The students qualified for the Michigan trip by doing well at two regional competitions, one in Pleasant Hill in February and the other in Visalia in April. What makes the Visalia victory even sweeter for the team, where it was crowned state champion in the skit category, is that this is Sacred Heart's first time participating in the Odyssey program.

"This is our first time doing it, and we even started a few months late," Murphy said.

Whether the students have a streak of beginner's luck or if they are simply that good, their sharp thinking skills are paying off. Besides the skit, they also have to compete in spontaneous exercises, in which only the judges see their performances. In one such exercise, they were asked to consider how many ways they can think of getting a tennis ball across a line with a given number of everyday objects.

"When I first started, I never heard of this program before, and I was skeptical as to what could be accomplished," coach Mark Marley, of San Jose, said. "But I've been impressed. Having the kids work together to come up with creative solutions is very valuable. Schools don't really teach that."

At the world finals, the Sacred Heart students will enjoy the pomp and circumstance of an international party, down to marching in an opening ceremony and trading pins with children of different regions. There are also the perks that every elementary child looks forward to, such as attending pre-teen parties and staying up late, they added.

However, the parents and coaches had no idea there was an opportunity for competition at the world level, and news of taking the team to one more round astonished them.

"We never dreamed that we had to ship our set to Michigan," Marley said. "It wasn't built with that in mind."

"No one is more surprised than we are," Marley added.