TJHSST Freshmen Coaches Odyssey of the Mind team to World Finals

Over the past 8 months, a 15 year old high school Freshman at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Neil Kothari, coached a team of 6th graders from Hunters Woods Elementary School for Odyssey of the Mind, an international creative problem-solving competition. The team arose to a shocking 2nd place finish at the Virginia State Finals tournament (held in Newport News) qualifying the team to compete at World Finals next week with over 800 qualifying teams from 36 US states and over 48 different countries at Iowa State University.

Millions of students from kindergarten through college have participated in the Odyssey of the Mind. This STEM-based program is extremely popular in the Fairfax and Loudoun County school districts where over 300 teams compete just at the regional level, yet only about 10 of those actually advance to World Finals. The Odyssey of the Mind program teaches students to learn creative problem-solving methods while having fun in the process. Students learn to work in teams of 5-7 members, and collaborate over the span of 6-8 months to develop a solution to the given problem.

The team competed in what is commonly known as the balsa the balsa structure problem, in which teams design and build a structure made of only balsa wood and glue to support as much weight as possible in Division II (the middle school level). The team built a 15-gram balsa wood tower that carried a whopping 1048 pounds before breaking, almost 32,000 times its own weight and yes, you read that right.

In a tournament, where all the coaches are adults (typically parents, or teachers), Neil was an outlier. He spent over 200 hours over last 8 months training a team that had very little Odyssey of the Mind experience. Although he was still eligible to participate in the competition as a high-schooler, after 8 years of participation, he chose to coach a team instead. He competed with coaches who are professionals with over 20 years of coaching experience, yet ended up as the youngest coach to ever qualify a team for World Finals, with a qualification process that accepts less than 2 of every 35 teams.

More details on the program can be found at Odyssey of the Mind website – www.odysseyofthemind.com