Words by Lauren McDonald | Photos by Bobby Haven

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It’s the middle of the school day at Frederica Academy, and the students are taking a break from class and focusing their energy on a new project. They’ve all got ideas, and they seem eager to share them. Some are taking notes on paper. Another is typing everyone’s suggestions onto a laptop.

Dividing into groups, the kids scatter around the middle school classrooms. One set discusses superhero themes and wooden car designs. Another reads through a script they’d written about an unpopular emoji. Up and down the hall, every student is exercising his or her mind, thinking critically and creatively, solving problems, and generating ideas.

And they’re doing it on a deadline. The students only have about two months left to prepare for their first Odyssey of the Mind competition.

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Odyssey of the Mind is a creative problem-solving competition for students of all ages. Participants must select a problem, create a solution, and then present their results during competition.

Frederica Academy introduced the program to its sixth-graders this semester to engage the students in a team-building, creativity-driven activity that allows them to develop critical thinking skills.

“It’s a great opportunity for our kids because it entails a lot of critical thinking, spontaneous problem solving, creativity, and all of the wonderful thinking skills we want our middle-schoolers to have,” says Leigh Toomey, middle school director and arts director at Frederica Academy. Toomey also serves as one of the team’s coaches.

Frederica Academy’s sixth-grade class was split into four groups, and each group has spent the semester tackling one of the problems. “Each group is working on a different problem,” Toomey explains. “And for each problem, they have to write a script.”

Along with a skit, the students have to design costumes and build props — all on a budget. “There’s a monetary limit on it, so they have to be very creative,” Toomey says. “They have to go home and find things in the garage and really think outside of the box.”

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Phoebe Shelton, a music teacher in the lower school, brought the program to Frederica Academy this year. She provides guidance to every group and also serves as the coach for the team in charge of the problem, “Emoji speak for yourself.”

“Their problem is really tough because they have to create a once-famous emoji that is no longer used, and then they have to tell the story of why it isn’t used anymore and how it somehow comes back,” she explains. “They also have to include a choreographed dance.”

But that’s not the hardest part. “There’s no speaking,” she says. “They cannot speak at all.”

Another group is writing a “mockumentary,” in which they take a well-known story — the students chose “Alice in Wonderland” — and retell it with a minor change no one knew about before. “There’s a character that’s talking about what really happened,” Shelton says. “They have to retell the story and say ‘No, I was there, and this is what really happened.’”

Odyssey of The Mind gives students practice in theater education, Shelton says. “They’re writing their own scripts and they’re making their own props, so they’re getting both sides of theater,” Shelton says. “They’re performing and they’re making it happen.”

The students will go up against other schools in their first competition on March 24 at Hawkinsville High School. “We decided, even though it’s our first year, we’re going to go for it and we’re going to head off for competition in March,” Toomey says. “We’re going to compete, and we’ll see how we do.”

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On the day of competition, the students will also have to solve a spontaneous problem. “They’ll be presented with a problem, and they’ll have to come up with something on the spot,” Toomey says.

The spontaneous problem challenge requires teamwork and quick thinking, Shelton says. “You can practice all you want, but you have no idea what it’s going to be,” she says. “You’re not even allowed to talk about it at competition. It’s very secretive.”

The winners will be determined by each group’s combined long-term score, style score, and spontaneous score.

To prepare, the students have been meeting every Friday this semester. Time to practice has also been added into the school day, Shelton says. “We built it right into our school day so we could make sure all of our students can participate,” she says. “Every single sixth-grader is participating.”

While every group has a coach, the competition forbids the students from receiving any sort of direct outside assistance. “You can actually lose points for that,” Shelton says. “So, say I come up with an idea, I can’t tell them … It’s totally student-done.”

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Coaches are only there to keep them on task, she says, and to guide where they can. “The students do it totally on their own, from the building and the writing to the coming up with ideas.”

Shelton says many people she’s spoken to locally have never heard of the Odyssey of the Mind program, despite the program having an international reach. “A lot of people haven’t (heard of it),” she says. “There’s literally a world final … Kids travel to Poland or to China and compete against kids from other countries.”

The program helps students develop skill sets that are a core component of the education Frederica Academy aims to provide, Shelton says. “Our mantra (at Frederica Academy) is to nurture the students’ mind, body, and soul,” she says. “(With Odyssey) they get their arts, where they have to be creative, and they have to write scripts and music and dance. But it also nurtures their mind because they’re thinking and coming up with these solutions.”

Next year, the school hopes to expand the program into the seventh andeighth grades.

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