After months of preparation, two of Westview’s Odyssey of the Mind teams took first place at the state competition, Saturday. 

Odyssey of the Mind is an international creative problem-solving competition. Every year, students at Westview form teams of five to seven students and choose one out of five options of problems to solve. The goal is to solve the chosen problem in the most creative way possible. While teams have a lot of freedom with their creative process, each team must still solve the problems within certain guidelines, including cost restrictions. 

President Brianna Vargas (12) and Treasurer Sydney Hubbard (12), members of the Classical challenge team, have been competing in Odyssey since they were in fifth grade. 

“To stay within the price boundaries, we try to buy as little material as we possibly can,” Vargas said. “We have a lot of materials because I’ve been doing Odyssey for eight years, and basically we have so many supplies that have built up over the years. To make costumes, we mostly use trash or recycled items. When it comes to Odyssey, being creative is using things in ways that you wouldn’t normally use them. For example, making trash bags or wrapping paper into a dress.”

This year, one of Westview’s Odyssey teams chose to compete in the Classical challenge. For the first half of the competition, the team chooses a lesser-known character from history and comes up with a musical that tells the figure’s life story. The second half is spontaneous where the team has to answer questions on the spot. 

Vargas said that her group’s process of brainstorming creative ideas is to use everyday items in an innovative way. When creating costumes for their performance, her team usually sketches out a rough draft and brainstorms new additions to expand beyond typical clothing.

“Once we have an idea, we think, ‘We could make our costume out of fabric, but what’s another black, smooth thing that looks like fabric? Black trash bags,’” Vargas said. “We alter our idea as a team to make it abnormal. It may be trash bags instead of fabric, ball caps instead of buttons, or masks instead of flowers.”

Last year’s competition was held virtually due to COVID restrictions. These restrictions also forced the team to work on different parts of their challenge by themselves. Now that the state competition has returned to an in-person setting, Vargas said her team was able to work together to prepare again.

“A lot of the time one of us may come up with an idea but get stuck halfway through and be unsure how we could continue to develop the idea,” Vargas said. “That’s where teamwork comes in—someone on the team is always there to offer up ideas and contribute to make [our performance] more creative.”

For example, when Vargas was in eighth grade, she said she built a cave out of milk jugs to try to create a textured backdrop of rocks for her team’s Hobbit skit. But after the cave was built, the end result was flatter than desired and didn’t resemble a cave of rocks.

“At that point, one of my teammates suggested, ‘What if we add some chicken wire to embellish certain parts of the milk jug to make the cave look more like a rock,” Vargas said. “So we ended up creating a cave that looked pretty realistic using that idea. We play off each other’s ideas, and then add on to what we already have.”

Katie Jacques (12) also said that bouncing off her teammates’ ideas is one of the most helpful parts when coming up with their scenes.

“Our discussions around what we plan to do are less of a serious discussion but more of us joking around and having a fun conversation,” Jacques said. “When we were researching the historical figure we would center our musical around, we found this person named Tycho Brache.”

Tycho Brache was an astronomer who was kidnapped by his uncle as a kid. He had an elk as a best friend and owned a psychic dwarf. Later in his life, he got into a sword fight with his cousin and lost his nose, so he wore a metal nose. Then, Brache had an affair with the queen and died from a bladder explosion.

At first, the team joked about the bizarre things they could perform with Brache’s story.

“We all thought, ‘Oh my God, this guy’s so crazy,’” Jacques said. “We ended up choosing Brache as the historical figure and then using all the things that we talked about in our performance.”

Jacques said that the emphasis placed on creativity within Odyssey of the Mind has been extremely helpful in and outside of competitions. After actively practicing out-of-the-box thinking with Odyssey, Jacques said it has helped her work better around kids.

“I think having a more open mindset to think of interesting things to say has helped me work with kids,” Jacques said. “Kids are very creative and fun to be around. So it’s helped me match their energy.”

Hubbard said that Odyssey has helped her to view problems in an entirely new way. 

“I’ve been able to see obstacles as ways to improve instead of things that are going to set me back,” Hubbard said. “This is most prominent when it comes to how I express myself creatively in my poetry and writing. I’m able to deal with writer’s block better because I’ve learned what inspires me consistently which has been very valuable for me as I search for different ways to express my own authentic voice.”