Pennsylvania Odyssey of the Mind

Pennsylvania competed at the first World Finals 1979-1980. The state of Pennsylvania was one of the first associations to be chartered. There are now approximately 14,000 Pennsylvania students participating in the program. Many Odyssey of the Mind scholarships have been awarded to our high school seniors. For competition purposes the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is divided into seven regions of which one is the Southwest region. Seven Regional Directors are responsible for training coaches and judges, providing teams with information throughout the year and coordinating the regional and state tournaments.

Odyssey of the Mind

The Odyssey of the Mind program was originally co-founded by Dr. Theodore Gourley and Dr. C. Samuel Micklus. For several years prior to 1978, Dr. Micklus challenged his students with creative problem-solving activities in his industrial design class at Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) in Glassboro, New Jersey. He used unusual and challenging problems to probe students' minds for solutions. For example, in Mad Chess, two teams were each to defend their "champions" (instead of queens since the class composition was all male). Chessmen wore colored pinnies such as those worn by intramural sports players. When a pinnie was "hit" by a Styrofoam ball, the "wounded" chessman was "captured" by the opposing team. The problem was to design a method of projecting the Styrofoam balls without directly touching the balls with the hands. "Risk takers" were rewarded more highly than students who simply solved the problem.

Because this educational approach was unusual, information about these activities made the newspaper. Dr. Ted Gourley, then the Director of the New Jersey State Department of Education-sponsored Project ICE (Institute for Creative Education) read about these activities and suggested an incorporation of this type of activity with a spring competition for 28 New Jersey junior and senior high schools. This resulted in the first Olympics of the Mind creative problem-solving competition, held in spring of 1978. A name change to Odyssey of the Mind was required due to prior rights to "Olympics".

In 1982 the Odyssey of the Mind program incorporated under the name OM Association Inc. to manage the creative problem-solving program. The Micklus family formed Creative Competitions Inc.to write the problems, program materials, and to sell the tournament memorabilia.

In September of 1999 The Odyssey of the Mind program and name was retained by the Micklus family (CCI), along with intellectual property rights of the "Raccoon" as the mascot and the "Bean-Head" logo, while OM Association began negotiations to administer another program.