By David Kilby, Managing Editor
CRANBURY — The talents and wits of seven Cranbury School fifth-graders earned them a spot in the international Odyssey of the Mind contest in Maryland over Memorial Day weekend.
The Odyssey of the Mind contest is an international educational program that provides creative problem-solving opportunities for students from kindergarten through college, reads the website, www.OdysseyoftheMind.com.
In the contest, which has been around for more than 25 years, team members apply their creativity to solve problems that range from building mechanical devices to presenting their own interpretation of literary classics.
They then bring their solutions to competition on the local, state and world level. Thousands of teams from throughout the United States and from about 25 other countries participate in the program, reads the website.
The contest sent the Cranbury team to a few faraway places such as the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland, and “Duct Tape World,” a place it made up for its award-winning project.
The members of the team are MaryRose Brendel, Rutha Chivate, Alex Cukier, Jason Li, Katie Thomsson, Neal Vasireddi and Roopa Venkatraman. All the students were in Laura Munice’s homeroom.
”Ms. Munice was very cooperative in supporting the team,” said Carol Rogaski, a Cranbury School gifted and talented teacher and teacher for the team.
Ms. Rogaski explained each of the three years Cranbury School has been participating in the contest, the school sent at least one team to state finals.
”But this was especially exciting as we had one of our teams go to world,” she said, adding the sequence is regional finals, state finals, then world finals.
”This year, we had a total of four teams that participated in the regional competition; two in fifth grade and two in sixth grade,” she said. “While we only had one team that qualified for the state tournament, all the teams had done a fine job on their projects for the year and had demonstrated a lot of creativity, hard work and teamwork.”
She also said the parents of the team members helped out a great deal.
”It was really a big team effort in a lot of ways,” Ms. Rogaski said.
In the contest, the team did Project Three of five projects.
In Project Three, teams created and presented an original performance where a classical character acted as a tour guide. The tour had to make three stops, including one that was a team-created location.
During the tour, an inanimate object had to show signs of life, the tour guide had to give the wrong explanation about something and had to give a creative explanation about why it is important to guard and secure a worthless item.
The team had to do all of this while spending no more than $125 on the project. The character the Cranbury team chose to be its tour guide was Amelia Bedelia, the protagonist in a series of children books.
The places it chose to visit in the tour were Venice, Egypt and Duct Tape World. They came up with the idea of Duct Tape World after noticing all the duct tape they used to build their project.
Duct tape also wound up being the worthless item they had to guard. It took such a prominent part in the team’s skit because the team wound up using so much of it to build their scenes.
To create their scenes, the team took a large canvas and painted a scene from Egypt on one side and a scene from Venice on the other.
”One of the things the judges commended them on was how flawless their scene changes were,” Ms. Rogaski said.
As they traveled through their different locations, they had to find ways to solve various different problems that arose along the way.
”The whole thing had a time limit of eight minutes,” Ms. Rogaski said.
There was also a limit to the amount of space the team had for props to be used in their project.
”Before every problem, we said we weren’t going to make it,” Alex said.
Since the program encourages the use of recycled items, the students wound up using crushed soda cans for certain parts of their project and pillowcases for tunics.
Project Three was part of the long-term contest, but there was also a separate contest called the spontaneous contest where the students had to explain some random situation the judges put before them while having no prior knowledge of the situation.
In this part, the Cranbury students had two bolts placed before them, a small one and a large one, and they had to have the bolts talk to each other and explain how the one got so big and how the other got so small.
The team received 10th place out of 65 teams in the spontaneous category in the international competition.
They worked on the long-term portion of the project from September up to the time of the competition in Maryland and placed 21st out of the 65 teams.
The team from Singapore won it all.
”They were so good, it’s not even funny,” Alex said. “We give our respect to them.”
The students met people from Russia, Japan and about a dozen other countries through the contest.
”It was really cool because people from Korea got to see you perform,” MaryRose said.
This was the first time Cranbury School has gotten to the world finals since the school began participating in the Odyssey of the Mind contest three years ago.
First the team went to regionals at Woodrow Wilson School in Edison on March 5, then to the state contest at Ewing High School on April 9, then to the international competition in the performing arts center at The University of Maryland.
Ms. Rogaski said the contest made the students draw in many different things, such as geography, acting, engineering and literature.
She said she was impressed by how much time and devotion they put into the project and thanked parents for their support.
”The parents were there to provide places to meet, let them use rooms in one another’s houses and transport things to competitions,” she said.
In all, the students built four scenes for their long-term project.
As they advanced, they were allowed to tweak their project. After discussing how to satisfy the judges more, they decided to add more entertaining aspects to their scenes.
So they added a juggling act by Neal during the closing number of their performance, and had Rutha play the violin while they were performing their scene in Venice.
”It was good just to learn about my teammates and their thoughts,” Neal said.
”I kind of learned Alex could rap,” he added, referring to a rap Alex did during the skit.
”I’ll remember how much fun it was, and also just getting that far,” Katie said.

