Developing creative problem solving skills can be a challenge at any age, but a group of students at Walter C. Polson Middle School are already champions at it—specifically, state champions. After taking second place in the Connecticut state competition, the Polson Odyssey of the Mind team is now heading to the World Finals competition in Iowa this May.

Odyssey of the Mind is an international program that encourages students to use creative skills to solve problems. Established in 1978, the program combines science, art, and math skills to pose challenges to students, for example, designing mechanical dinosaurs, turning Pandora’s Box into a video game, or inventing a new factory machinery.

All solutions are completely student-generated and require students to perform skills from the arts and sciences in front of audiences and judges.

The team of seven from Polson has been working together in some capacity since their elementary school days and includes Ella Bennett, Chloe Burt, Alanna Fay, Kelly Fay, Liam Lynch, Erika Rupp-Coppi, and Mahir Thadani. The team participated in its first Odyssey competition when the members were in 3rd grade and has since gone to World Finals twice.

At the World Finals competition this year, the team is one of nearly 850 teams from across the globe coming to compete.

The team gets to select a problem to tackle from a set list of topics such as technical challenges or classics challenges on which it works in advance for the competition and then also has to prepare for a series of spontaneous challenges, a series of problems it must tackle with no prep time before a panel of judges on competition day.

This year the students chose from the classics, picking a classic fairytale and putting a twist on it. The challenge is called “Mockumentary! Seriously?” requiring the students to pick a classic story and pit known characters against each other as they try to tell their classic story. The Polson team chose Peter Pan and set the story in a court room, putting Pan on trial for kidnapping Wendy and breaking and entering into her home.

Students wrote the script for the story, built the sets, designed the costumes, and have been working on this problem since September. Every problem has required elements that must be included and the students are judged on the overall production, how well they follow restrictions in the problem, and style points.

It’s not an easy competition and it certainly takes a lot of time, but the students said taking part in this program has helped them grow as students and given them a chance to be creative.

“What you gain from it, or at least what I have found, is it helps me solve everyday problems,” said Lynch.

The opportunity to return to the World Finals competition is also a big plus for the students. Alanna Fay said this program has made her more outgoing as it’s great to meet students from around the world and Burt said it’s interesting to see how students from different states and countries tackle the same problems as them.

“You get to be really creative and see what other people did,” she said. “It’s a good life experience doing this and working with people in a group.”

With the World Final competition from Wednesday to Saturday, May 23 to 26, the team is raising money to help cover the cost of making it out to Iowa. Laura Lynch, one of the team’s coaches, said the team is raising money for transportation and lodging as well as shipping their props and backdrops out to Iowa.

The team is hosting a bake sale at the Madison Stop & Shop on Sunday, May 13. The team has also set up a gofundme page (search “polson odyssey”). To learn more about Odyssey of the Mind, visit www.odysseyofthemind.com.