After finishing second last year, the Indian River School District’s elementary school Odyssey of the Mind (OM) team won a world championship in Iowa over the weekend.
The elementary school team, coached by Lisa Forney — a 15-year OM veteran — has finished in the top 10 in the last three years. Two years ago, the team finished sixth under the guidance of Forney. To win the world championship this year, it competed against 36 teams from across the nation and the world in the Jungle Bloke problem Division I.
“It’s pretty phenomenal when you think about it,” Forney said. “This is the first time the district has done so well. They were real excited,” she said of the team’s members, all of whom are fifth graders in the southern Delaware district. “I’m not real sure if they understand the accomplishment.”
According to Forney, only three Delaware teams have won world championships in nearly three decades of participation in the far-reaching program. To win the worlds, Indian River used the same long-term “jungle bloke” problem-solving performance that made them winners of Delaware state championships.
In the jungle bloke long-term question, which three of the Indian River teams used at states, students must solve a problem using a bloke, a rainforest setting and different animals.
After researching the animals and the different types of rainforests, the fifth-grade team came up with a scenario in which the bloke was looking for a lost treasure in the woods. The animals of the rainforest helped him find the treasure, and he, in turn, helped them with a growing noise problem by using bananas and nuts to make noise-mufflers. All of the solutions must be created by the students and teams are penalized if judges sense any adult interaction, Bunting said. But Forney said that her fifth-grade students don’t usually need any help.
“I gather my team together and put all of the problems out in front of them. They vote on what they want to do. Then we do a lot of brainstorming,” she said. “They are some fantastic academic students.”
According to the program’s Web site at www.odysseyofthemind.com, thousands of teams from the United States and 25 other countries participate in the program created by Dr. C Samuel Micklus, a professor at Rowan University in Southern New Jersey. In 1978, the Web site says, 28 teams from New Jersey participated in the first OM problem-solving competition.
Students from those thousands of teams now compete on the state, regional and world levels, the most recent of which was held at Iowa State University. The Indian River elementary school team was one of five Division I world winners out of hundreds of teams in last week’s competition.
Susan Bunting, the district’s director of instruction, superintendent-to-be and OM advisor, said she expects Indian River’s domination to continue with Forney at its base.
“With Lisa Forney at the beginning, I do believe we’ve been able to build the program. She manages to get them so well oriented to the program,” Bunting said in an earlier interview.
“It’s like a farm system for a baseball team,” she added. “We give them a really firm foundation so they can move on and still have success.”