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Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

 

 

I had a great weekend as an official for Odyssey of the Mind World Finals and have a few thoughts to share…so here are not so random OM thoughts.

  1. I hadn’t realized how long it has been since I was on the Iowa State campus. I had some spare time in between judging duties and wandered around to look at all those places I remembered from twenty-five years ago. My dorm is long gone, but many of the old places I used to roam around were still there. The city of Ames and Iowa State University were great hosts!

  2. Someone asked me what Odyssey of the Mind was. It is a problem solving competition for kids from kindergarten to college age. The students select a “long-term” problem and work hard on it through out the winter. They give their “solution” at State Finals and the top teams get selected to go to World Finals. I like to think of it as good preparation to “thinking outside the box”.

  3. The other half of the competition is called Spontaneous. Teams are given a problem and a set amount of time to figure out a solution. Sounds easy? Here was my problem. Split your team into two groups…signalers and shoppers. The shoppers are blindfolded and must move throughout the room at the direction of the signalers in order to find the “special marked” items. The signalers can only use a bell, two sticks, a dog toy and two ice cube trays to make their signals and absolutely no talking or body noise of any kind can be used. Ready? Go!

  4. I ate well, slept soundly and came home with a bug. I knew I was starting to run down after a few hours of sleep each night, but it wasn’t until I was home that the fever hit me full bore and I spent all day in bed. 17,000 kids and I had to find the one contagious one in the bunch to shake my hand!

  5. The group from West Central Valley placed 34th in their division and to be quite honest that is doing pretty darn good. With kids involved in so many different things these days it is hard to really spend as much time as is needed on the long term problem.

  6. I snuck over to the Reimen Gardens on Wednesday to see the giant Lego display. They are cool and the giant gnome is awesome!

  7. Two words. Hickory Park.

  8. Finally, I can sum up my experience as one of those few times where I get excited about what young people are doing these days. Oh sure, it wasn’t without a bit of drama and more than enough pin trading to make me insane, but all in all it was time well spent.

See you next week…Remember, we’re all in this together.