Western New England College to Host "Odyssey of the Mind"

SPRINGFIELD, Ma. — Four hundred students, from grades kindergarten to eighth, from Berkshire, Hampden, Franklin, Hampshire, and Worcester counties will gather at Western New England College on Saturday March 13, 1999, for the Regional Tournament of The Odyssey of the Mind program.

The Odyssey of the Mind School Program fosters creative thinking and problem-solving skills among participating students from kindergarten through college. It features an annual competition component at local through international levels. Students solve problems in a variety of areas -- from building mechanical devices such as spring-driven vehicles to giving their own interpretation of literary classics. Thousands of student from around world now participate in the program.

The competition between the teams will be start at approximately 8:30 and will conclude at 4:00 p.m.

The OM program was originally co-founded by Dr. Theodore Gourley and Dr. C. Samuel Micklus. For several years prior to 1978, Dr. Micklus challenged his students with creative problem-solving activities in his industrial design class at Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) in Glassboro, New Jersey. Because this educational approach was unusual, information about these activities made the newspaper. Dr. Ted Gourley, then the Director of the New Jersey State Department of Education-sponsored Project ICE (Institute for Creative Education) read about these activities and suggested an incorporation of this type of activity with a spring competition for 28 New Jersey junior and senior high schools. This resulted in the first OM (then Olympics of the Mind) creative problem-solving competition, held in spring, 1978. In 1980, OM sponsored its first World Finals.

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