Students Team Up, Pit Creative Talents Event At Ewu Stresses Joy Of Academic Competition
It wasn’t your typical mental muscle contest. The students weren’t wearing their formal best.
Before her turn onstage Saturday in the regional Odyssey of the Mind competition at Eastern Washington University, 15-year-old Melissa Berube was even told she had to put on some shoes.
The fuzzy socks she wore as part of her dog outfit weren’t safe enough. Judges worried she might step on a tack or something.
Berube was one of about 700 kids who mustered up their creative talents as part of teams representing Eastern Washington schools. The event had a two-pronged philosophy: Mental games can be just as fun and competitive as physical sports, and academic events don’t have to be boring regurgitations of trivia.
“It gives kids a chance to practice and use their creativity,” said Sue Fischer, the event’s regional director. “They’re given a problem with parameters, but it’s up to them to solve it.”
Berube and the rest of her Horizon Junior High School team were entrants in the “Great Impressions” category. The team had to take a French impressionist painting and a poem by an English writer and concoct a skit around them. They also had to write a poem about the painting and draw a picture that represents the poem.
Berube narrated the Horizon skit, a story of how two relatives - one French, one English - had to come to appreciate each other’s artistic bent in order to collect the goods left to them in an uncle’s will. It was short, but still a full-on production with at least four different backdrops. Berube was the uncle’s bloodhound.
Other competitions required young engineers to build a balsa wood structure that could support heavy weights, and at the same time withstand being bombarded by billiard balls.
A group of first- and second-graders from Roosevelt Elementary put on a skit in the “Better Safe Than Sorry” competition. They had to give a safety message, and do it using a humorous character that gets into trouble.
Mary Weller was an accident-prone witch. “Want to see something pretty?” she asked the other kids.
They said, “Sure.” Mary pretended to strike a match against a big matchbox, then whipped a bright orange pom-pom out of nowhere, throwing in on the floor.
“FIRE!” the kids hollered.
The production went over without a hitch. Don and Lynn Lamson, the team’s coaches, couldn’t have been happier. They are Roosevelt parents and their daughter, Lauren, was also in the skit.
It was their first year, but they’ll probably be back.
“And I want to be on the same team,” Mary said.
, DataTimes