Saturday morning I went to a training class for being a coach for Eric's Odyssey of the Mind team.  Odyssey of the Mind is a competitive "creativity' league, where students compete as a team to solve both long term and spontaneous creativity "challenges". 

This year Eric's teams long term project is creating a vehicle that can move around the floor of a gym get 'tagged' by a student.  The kids have to come up with a vehicle, a tagging system, and a tag sorting system.  The team includes 3d-5th graders, and the kids have to do everything, from designing to building, with no outside assistance.

The other part of the competition is a verbal or hands on creativity exercise that the kids have to do without hearing what the problem will be until they are actually at the competition.  The students are judged based on how creative their answer is. 

This is Eric's first year, and I volunteered to be a coach.  I am not sure how smart that was, because sometimes I can barely stand my OWN kids, let alone someone else's.  The school that Eric goes to has a pretty active program, and the teachers and the other volunteer parent are all first rate.  It's really fun to see the kids think through problems, and come up with solutions.

The regional competition is in March, at Wingate University.  The kids practice about 4 hours a week, and they all seem to be having a great time.  I am surprised how much I like helping out.  The coach for our team is also Eric's teacher, and I think that we will get along nicely.

Since Eric's team is participating in an mechanical type project, the coaches and other parents got the weird idea that I was an engineer.  They don't realize that I majored in History and Political Science at Beer U, and have to call my dad to help me change a float ball in a toilet.