Long Beach kids honored for Odyssey of the Mind world finals

Long Beach elementary school students were some of the lucky ones from the United States to make it to this year’s world finals of the Odyssey of the Mind competition.

The two teams from Long Beach Learning Activities for Raising Creativity (LARC) program that made it through the regional and state contests to the world finals were honored last week by the Long Beach City Council.

The teams comprised of fourth- and fifth-graders competed against more than 800 teams, of the same age, from around the world at the University of Maryland on May 28. The Odyssey of the Mind competition gives kids problems they need to solve.

But this is no math or science problem, these problems make kids think differently and use creative thinking and reasoning to come up with solutions.

Beverlee Bertinetti, one of the coaches for the LARC program, has coached kids for the Odyssey of the Mind competition for 15 years and teaches the LARC program after school out of East School. She was proud of her students for making it as far as they did.

“It’s quite involved and a lot of hard work, and the kids do work very hard on this,” she said. “You know their hard work paid off.”

The teams are made up of students from the four Long Beach elementary schools - East, West, Lido and Lindell - along with kids from Long Beach Catholic Regional School.

The teams are made up of the best of the best. Bertinetti said the students must try out for one the 21 spots on the three teams the program puts together.

This was the first time that Long Beach had two teams go the world finals, and Bertinetti says she feels honored to have helped the kids get there.

The two Long Beach teams competed in different divisions.

One team that placed 17th out of 61 competed in “As Good as Goldberg”, where the students needed to build a Rube Goldberg device, write a script and build the scenery for the presentation.

The device they built came from the skit they performed of a doctor telling his patient that he could not use salt on his food. So the kids built a device that would have a marble roll down a track and eventually knock over the salt on the plate so the patient could salt his food but also listen to his doctor.

The other team placed eighth out of 63 in Le Tour Guide, where students needed to bring a group of people on a tour of two real locations and one fictitious place. It had to involve humor and have a non-living object come to life. The students chose to take their group to New York and Paris; and created a place where everything is beautiful and everything wonderful happens in Ethiopia. For the non-living object that came to life, the kids used the Statue of Liberty.

Jesse Scott, 10, who was a fifth grader from East School and a member of the Le Tour Guide team, says the experience is like none other.

“The highlight was watching everybody else perform too, you can see what everyone’s skit is like and see what they worked on to get to the world competition,” Scott said.

Scott plans on continuing the competition both in middle school and high school.

“It’s a lot of fun and really expresses creativity,” Scott said about the competition. “We meet new people, and we have experiences that we wouldn’t have if we hadn’t joined.”

The problems come with a lot of strict rules the kids have to abide by. Bertinetti said the kids work on the problems after school and on weekends from October until the first competition in March where they hope to go on to the next round.

But that is all that Bertinetti does. She and her fellow coach Caitlin Fuentes only advise the kids. They are so hands off that when a set piece they brought to Maryland from New York was damaged during the trip, they kids fixed it without help.

“It’s really child driven the couch is there just to facilitate, to make sure things go right, Bertinetti said. “This was just a great, great group of kids, even to have, three teams go to the state finals, that was such a big accomplishment.”