Teams from the Moon Area and Upper St Clair school districts have earned trophies during the Odyssey of the Mind World Finals competition in Ames, Iowa.
Moon Area High School won second place in its division, and Upper St. Clair’s Fort Couch Middle School team took home a third-place trophy.
The teams competed in late May with over 800 teams from around the world, including other local teams from Quaker Valley and Penn Hills.
Odyssey of the Mind is an extracurricular program for students in kindergarten through college. Students work in teams to solve open-ended problems that may be technical, artistic or performance-based. Students are encouraged to think “outside of the box” to come up with a solution.
Moon Area High School’s team solved a problem called “Fins, Furs, Feathers, and Friends” and presented a comedic performance to raise awareness of the harm to animals caused by animal testing.
Upper St. Clair’s seventh-grade team from Fort Couch Middle School solved problem called “Aesop Gone Viral,” which required the students to create and present an original performance about one of Aesop’s fables.
The team’s performance was set during the American Revolution and told the tale of a distant relative of Aesop, who decided to publish a fable in Benjamin Franklin’s newspaper to inspire soldiers with the moral, “Whatever you do, use with your might.” During the performance, three team members acted as Rain, which fell and absorbed the moral from the newspaper. The rain then evaporated, thereby delivering the moral to Lightning and Wind. Wind whispered the message to the soldiers on the ground, and in a clever twist, Franklin misheard the moral as a call to use his “kite” instead of his “might,” and thereby made one of the most famous discoveries in American history when Lightning struck.
Laura Murtough, Odyssey of the Mind coach and program co-coordinator for Fort Couch, said that taking home a trophy from the world finals is a “huge accomplishment, given the scale of the event.”
Quaker Valley’s team and Moon Area’s other team ranked 13th and 15th out of 48 other teams in their division. Penn Hills Elementary School’s team ranked 15th out of about 70 others.
Shellie Petri Budzeak, freelance writer: suburbanliving@post-gazette.com
First Published: June 10, 2016, 4:00 a.m.
