BY MARY KATE MURPHY, Insider Reporter
The seven Moore County middle school students heading to Odyssey of the Mind World Finals next month are a dream team in every sense of the word.
Since they were third graders at West Pine Elementary, they’ve spent hundreds of hours together in their parents’ garages letting their imaginations run wild. They traveled to Michigan in 2019 as a fourth-grade team for the Odyssey World Finals, ranking ninth out of nearly 70 teams from across the United States, Europe and Asia.
Now they’re fundraising for a second attempt at international glory at Iowa State University at the end of May.
The team — Harper Aldridge, Lila Aldridge, David Antil, Connor Cuff, Joel Cuthrell, Nora Kuzma and Ryland McCloskey — qualified earlier this month with a third-place finish out of 14 middle school teams at the North Carolina state tournament at Western Carolina University.
Michelle Cuthrell, who co-coaches the group with Laura Kuzma, has her work cut out for her when she explains what it is her sons spend so much time doing.
Odyssey of the Mind competitions are fundamentally a problem-solving exhibition. But the way students have to demonstrate that skill incorporates writing, storytelling, music and costume design on top of engineering and science.
“The beautiful thing about Odyssey is even though team members are supervised by adult coaches, the adult coaches contribute nothing to the solution. Everything is completely student executed,” said Cuthrell.
“Everything is done only by students without adult assistance, which means when they go to competitions they are truly taking their own ideas, their own original props, that they have spent five to 10 hours per week for seven months developing.”
Their finished product in what’s called the “long-term problem” element of the competition is an eight-minute skit based on a prompt supplied by the Odyssey of the Mind organization. The synopsis provides a general theme for the problem as well as several requirements that each entry has to fulfill.
Teams from West Pine and Pinecrest have put in strong showings at the state and world level of Odyssey of the Mind competition in recent years. This year’s middle school team is officially entered as a community-based team sponsored by FirstHealth of the Carolinas, so that the students could compete together even though some of them now attend Southern Middle School.
Splitting up wasn’t an option after the team spent the 2021 school year as an extemporaneous homeschool unit enrolled in Moore County Schools’ virtual academy.
“These seven kids spent 28 hours a week together at three different houses doing school and extracurriculars. These kids are so tight: they brainstorm so well together, they problem solve so well together and are such sweet, compassionate friends and teammates,” Cuthrell said.
“We are so grateful to FirstHealth for sponsoring us so we could even participate as a community team. But none of our funds for World finals are coming from FirstHealth which is why it’s challenging right now to do a little bit of fundraising because we don’t have the names of schools to back us this year.”
This year’s long-term problem required them to invent a circus world and devise a story about a young person who is suddenly transported into it. The prompt requires standard Big Top-issue elements: a ringmaster, a clown, animals performing tricks.
But the Moore County team decided against taking the problem at face value and came up with a more original solution: the real-life circus that comes to every shopping center in America on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
It’s that innovative thinking that fueled the rest of their ideas. The final skit involves a mob scene created using mannequins that can be moved like puppets and a robotic bird that manipulates prices with a flap of its wings.
No theatrical production is complete without music, and the team didn’t have to go far to find theirs: they recorded it themselves on their own instruments.
The combined effort earned them the prestigious Ranatra Fusca Award for extraordinary creativity at the state tournament, the only one awarded to the nearly 100 elementary, middle and high school teams competing.
“A lot of kiddos in this problem would have gone with a straight traditional circus and they went outside the box with this idea of what a circus looks like in the real world on Black Friday as mobs descend on department stores,” Cuthrell said.
“They went way above and beyond what I’ve ever seen them do before and just knocked it out of the park.”
Their next challenge is getting seven students and a trailer load of props to Iowa May 25-28. There’s no Odyssey of the Mind division for that particular logistical challenge. Costs are estimated at $1,600 per student, and Cuthrell has set a $10,000 fundraising goal.
For information or to donate, visit www.gofundme.com/f/moore-county-odyssey-of-the-mind-world-finals
Contact Mary Kate Murphy at (910) 693-2479 or mkmurphy@thepilot.com.
