Lynchburg area middle schoolers to compete in national Odyssey of the Mind competition

By Christa Desrets
Lynchburg News & Advance
Published: May 16, 2008

The team of seven boys spent months designing and painstakingly building a bridge-like structure that was both lightweight and strong.

Ted Simopoulos’ favorite part?

Watching and listening as the masterpiece smashed to pieces.

“It’s like the sound of when you break a pencil with your hands,” he said, but louder.

Pushing the limits of that breaking point was a key point of the project. The boys did so well that they won a state competition last month.

And that puts them in the competition’s World Finals next month in Maryland.

Simopoulos and his six friends — sixth-graders from Forest Middle School, Holy Cross Regional Catholic School and Liberty Christian Academy — took first place in their division of the Odyssey of the Mind state competition.

The event puts students’ creativity to the test as they are asked to perform a momentous task — in their case, build a “Tee Structure” out of no more than 18 grams (that’s less than an ounce) of balsa wood that can hold up to 10 golf balls and withstand the pressure from weights piled on top.

In September, the group began meeting once a week for at least a couple hours, and sometimes all day to brainstorm and build their project.

The boys decided to base their structure’s support system on that of a bridge.

They also had to construct a method for the structure to hold golf balls without allowing them to roll off. The team decided they wanted their project to hold all 10 balls, earning them bonus points.

At the competition, a board is placed on top of the completed project, and then two team members, Courtney Goodwill and Tyler Lash, pile barbells on top and try to get it to hold as much weight as possible.

When they hear the structure begin to creak and moan, they shift to lighter barbells, to get the maximum weight.

At the regional competition in March, their structure held 231 pounds before smashing apart.

At state, a new structure held 337 pounds.

Now, the group is working on their final structure, and team member Sam Tatum said he is aiming for one that will hold 1,000 pounds.

At the World Finals, the group will go up against 58 other teams from across the United States, and the world, with teams from Belgium, Poland, Japan, China, Singapore, Canada and Mexico.

During the competition, as Courtney and Tyler pile the weights on, their teammates entertain the audience for eight minutes with a wacky skit they dreamed up involving Abraham Lincoln’s golf caddy, an assassin and Richard Nixon.

In addition to the project and the skit, a third aspect of the competition involves the group being asked to solve a spontaneous problem and act out the solution with only a few minutes of preparation time. Extra points are given for originality.

At the state competition, the group was asked to pretend they were ants who climbed to the top of the hill and were asked to explain to other ants what they had seen on the other side, said team member Joel Worford.

Now, the group faces another task — raising the roughly $10,000 coach Peter Worford estimates the group will need for their trip to the World Finals, held this year at the University of Maryland on May 31.

The group has raised about half of that amount already through contributions from the Bedford County School Board and other local donors.

They are holding bake sales and fundraising campaigns to come up with the remainder before the end of the month.

Worford said the group of boys, which also includes Sandeep Murthy and Jacob Laurent, is about halfway through building their final structure, which will inevitably be smashed by the end of the competition.

Ted said he didn’t mind.

“That was our favorite part.”

Ted Simopoulos helps build a prop used during a skit for the World Finals of the Odyssey of the Mind.
KIM RAFF/THE NEWS & ADVANCE