In 1978 Dr C Samuel Micklus held a creativity competition called Olympics of the Mind (OM) at Glassboro State College. He didn’t believe you were born creative. He thought creativity was a skill you could improve and founded a competition dedicated to fostering that idea.
I was born in 1978 and this doesn’t seem radical to me. Childhood in the 1980s was filled with creative toys like Lego, Construx, Spirographs, crayons, paints, etc. I think OM took off for another reason: DIY
The creative solutions kids come up are completely designed and implemented by them. They write their own scripts, sew their own costumes, construct their own props, design their own machines, and paint their own sets. Have you ever seen a 4th grader us a mitre saw? 3rd graders cutting PVC pipes? 9th graders using a sewing machine? I have.
This DIY spirit is really what sold me on getting my kids involved in OM. The default expectation in parenting today is that the parents do everything. They yell from the sidelines at Soccer games, make the costumes for the play, drive them anywhere and everywhere, signing them up for everything without asking. And we do this out of love and devotion to our kids, but it’s too much.
Needing to measure and compare creativity, Micklus came up with the concept of Outside Assistance. If anyone not on the team assists in their solution, the kids are penalized. The tournament directors remind parents “not to even fix a collar in the hallway.” So what happens when you remove adults and leave 7 kids to fend for themselves?
My theory is that as long as basic needs are met, there is an inverse relationship to how much assistance a kid is given on a task to how much they get out of it.
Something like this totally made up chart:
There’s something magical happening around 20%, 10%, 1% assistance where real learning takes off.
I went to a new parent meeting in 2014 put on by Kenneth Allendoerfer and Jess Tighe, the first Collingswood OM coaches. It sounded great, so I signed Sasha up for primary club in 2015 and their solution was for a problem called Silent Movie, which is a cruel joke that OM likes to play on their audiences and judges sometimes. It’s hard enough to understand un-mic’d elementary school kids on a stage, but also sometimes the problem requires them to be silent during the performance. So imagine around 10-12 first timers, in 2nd grade, putting on a sketch where they can’t add exposition to a scene. A scene written by 2nd graders. The result is avant garde worthy theater.
Not a play with 2nd graders. A play from 2nd graders.
I signed up to be an OM coach the next year because I couldn’t really commit to being a soccer coach: I got home after dark and OM practiced inside and could hold practices later. I didn’t give it much more thought than that and certainly didn’t think I’d be signing up for 10 years, 4 trips across the country, and countless hours acquiring materials. I was randomly paired up with another parent in the program, Kelly Zenfell, whose son was on another team and coached by his dad. Again, no thought just “here are some people willing to be coaches let’s give them a team” and l was luckily paired with a dedicated, organized co-coach for the next decade.
That first year (2016) was tough. That first practice was tough. We couldn’t get into the practice space we had at the Heights of Collingswood / Parkview so we quickly booked an alternative room at the Collingswood Library. The kids ran around like maniacs until Kelly arrived and calmed them down. Sasha, Nico, Finn, Courtney, Quinn, and Matteo did an exercise where they pretended to be reporters, interviewed each other, and did a news broadcast on the results. We looked at the 5 different OM long term problems and the kids voted on which one they wanted to do. It was three for problem 1 (Vehicle), three for problem 5 (Theater) and one for problem 3 (Classics). Eventually Finn defected to problem 5 and we stuck with it for the next 10 years. I’m not sure it’s possible for any Collingswood kids to ever do problem 5 more than Sasha and Nico have.
The first year’s problem was called Fur’s, Fin’s, Feathers, and Friends and the kids created a story about the forest being taken over by an evil clown chipmunk, who was clearing the forest to make room for his circus. The problem called for a door and I remember the kids making one and they put the door knob in the center. As a coach I couldn’t tell them they should put the doorknob off to one side, but I suggested we go on a field trip and walked them over to an actual door and asked them to spot any differences between the door they made and this one. OM coaches really have to lean in with the Socratic Method.
After many rehearsals we loaded up our props and competed at our first regional tournament inside the Woodstown High School library. We went on late in the day and between lunch and spontaneous, we didn’t get a chance to see any other teams compete. We came in 9th place, but the kids had fun. As a coach I was left with a feeling that I didn’t really know how to get better at this.
Someone suggested we come watch the state finals so a month later we packed lunches, drove to Ewing High School and sat and watched almost every team performing our problem across every division. Did it help?
For the next 9 years we won our regional tournament 7 times. We placed 3rd at State Finals in 2021, 2nd in 2022 and 2023, and 1st in 2024 and 2025. We competed at the World Finals from 2022 – 2025 and finished in 5th place this year in problem 5, division 3, our best showing.
Odyssey of the Mind is one of those bizarre activities that doesn’t really make sense to anyone other than the people deeply involved and I think it’s because it’s about the process and not the result. Sports have their games and theater has their performances, and of course OM teams have them, too, but watching an OM performance without understanding the problem is like starting a movie halfway through. It is truly by and for the kids and the skills they acquired to get there.
But for me, I appreciated getting to experience this 10 year journey with my daughter and seeing her grow into a creative powerhouse. Sometimes I feel like the Odyssey kids are the only ones I really know in this town, but what a great group of kids they are.
Every year they incorporated a new skill, a new process, shipped the performance, and then started over in September. Even when we had new kids join the team, they were folded in seamlessly and you could see the veterans evaluating the newcomers’ skills and deploying them to the solution. I’m not sure they even realize yet how valuable that will be in life.
Looking back on the 10 years I have a strong appreciation for the kids that came back year after year. The film director Robert Rodriguez likes to say he “commits to a body of work” and I feel that strongly with this team. Look at the stats year by year, we were never the best until we were. Maybe Dr Sam is right and creativity is a learned skill. Thank you Kelly, Sasha, Nico, Finn, Finley, Ruby, Jade, Cassidy, Sailor, Calvin, Mike, Carter, Mia, Quinn, Enzo, Reagan, Skylar, CJ, Matteo, Geoff, and Courtney. Also thanks Ken Allendoerfer and Jess Tighe and the countless volunteers we have in this program.
Today is father’s day and Sasha framed her 2016 team shirt for me as a gift (you can see her wearing it in one of the photos above).
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