Odyssey of the Mind

This county has a population of roughly 10,000-11,000 and a public school population that barely grazes over the 2,000 mark.

Those sorts of numbers define small-town, small-town values, politics and community.

In the span of the globe, one becoming smaller on Google maps but not that small, those numbers also represent a mighty tiny slice, a mere dot.

And, yet, from that dot have now emerged for three consecutive years a high school Odyssey of the Mind team that has qualified for the World Finals, two of those teams heading off to the Worlds as state champions.

I knew nothing of Odyssey of the Mind when I arrived in this portion of paradise, had never heard of this complex problem-solving competition that puts students to a test far more accurate a gauge of learning than any FCAT or other testing acronym could.

Each team must choose a problem to solve through a performance that enlists the talents of a disparate group of roughly six or seven kids.

Choosing the problem - to decipher some era in history or construct a mechanical device that performs tasks on cue, as just two examples - is just the beginning.

A performance must be conceived and mapped out, step by step, as carefully as if creating a movie using storyboard.

Parts must be assigned, dialogue written, stage backdrop and costumes designed and crafted.

Everything must be undertaken and completed by the students. All of it.

The sponsors or coaches are there as more or less chaperones at a school dance; they can help keep the kids on task, but the dance steps and partners are entirely in the hands and brains of the students.

The students must complete and hone this performance over a period of a couple of months. The performance must not tarry past a specified time, about eight minutes, and everything must be created on a budget of $145.

This is all in addition to facing a spontaneous problem that the team must solve on the fly once competition gets underway.

And in crafting their long-problem performances, teams must search for a wow factor, something to set them apart from the other very large brains that will be competing against them as they move from district to regional to state and, hopefully, Worlds.

In the case of a previous team from Wewahitchka High School, the wow came from an ingenuous contraption that was essentially a small hovercraft powered by a hair dryer.

Two consecutive years that team went to Worlds, once as state champion. They finished in the top 15 one year, just behind, uh, the Czech Republic.

As school board chairman George Cox alluded to during a recent meeting, the competition at Worlds is as stiff as a mainsail in a gale.

Maybe it is Ames, Iowa, not exactly the first spot on the map that conjures up a meeting of great minds, but teams from throughout Europe, North America and other far-flung locales come to the World Finals to show their odyssey was the brightest.

This year, a team from Port St. Joe High School, the first from that school, will travel late next month to the World Finals.

The wow factor in this team's performance is a remote-controlled robot that uses cooper pennies as conductors to transmit various commands through an Iron Man module on the student who created the WiFi program that operates it, Jesse Raffield.

Who, like Matthew Miller of Wewahitchka High before him, was just fiddling around with ideas, had always wanted to build a robot - in Miller's case, the search was for an engineering marvel of movement - and just thought it would be fun.

However, as with the best of sports standouts, such as a Kayla Parker, Kayla Minger or a Samantha Rich, there is in Raffield the genuine projection that he is just one of many, one spoke in the wheel his team had constructed over the years they have been together through middle and high school.

And that is how it has been with all three teams that have put Gulf County on the map with Odyssey of the Mind, a feeling that these are teams without an "I", a group of youngsters who have melded brain power, personality and passion in a common direction toward a common goal with the same discipline evidenced in the best of athletic teams.

In doing so, they do a community proud; showing off the best of what little Gulf County, or heck, America in general, can produce.

They provide hope about the next generation and about what is happening inside the walls of the county's public schools.

That is worth getting behind, supporting, nurturing.

Worth it for the district officials to consider long and hard before cutting any further funding for the Odyssey of the Mind programs in the schools, and worth a community supporting a series of fund-raisers over the coming weeks as the team tries to come up with the thousands it will take to travel to Ames.

The first one is a yard sale this Saturday from 7 a.m. until noon at First Baptist Church in Port St. Joe. If you have an item to donate contact the team's coach Carla May. Otherwise come out and find an item or two to take home and in doing so send some fine ambassadors of the county to the world stage.