UpDate - Vol. 15, No. 37, Page 7
July 18, 1996
Odyssey of the Mind; UD team takes first place in world competition
Dressed in sheets they bought at the local Goodwill store and
wearing jewelry made from aluminum foil, four University engineering
students won first place in the 1996 world competition of the Odyssey
of the Mind (OM), an international celebration of creative problem-
solving.
For this year's event, held during the first week of June at Iowa
State University in Ames, the students designed a fragile-looking
balsa wood structure that weighed just 18 grams but could hold up to
400 pounds of weight while withstanding the impact of billiard balls.
Team members were Sarah Guglielmi, Delaware '96 of Fairport,
N.Y.; Tanya Swiderski, Delaware '96, of Bel Air, Md., and
Wilmingtonians Ryan Smith and Michael Young, both of whom will
graduate in January. The team was coached by Mark Gruber, Delaware
'78, '81M, a team leader in the DuPont Co.'s composites division.
On the way to the world competition, the team mentored a fifth
grade class working on the same OM problem in its age division, made a
professional presentation to the DuPont Co. and spent a few anxious
moments drying the structure under a hand drier in a men's room.
The trip, the presentation and even the first-place trophy-too
tall to fit into any display case in Spencer Laboratory-were just
icing on the cake, according to Michael Keefe, mechanical engineering.
The important point is that all of this was part of a very
serious mechanical engineering senior design project, which Keefe and
Dick Wilkins, mechanical engineering, coordinate.
As wacky as some of it sounds, "first and foremost this was an
academic exercise," Keefe said. In addition to ending up in togas, the
students also earned important individual and team grades in
mechanical engineering, well before the competition began.
The problem, titled "Crunch"- because eventually all of the
structures do collapse-was designed by the OM Association Inc., a
worldwide nonprofit organization that fosters creative thinking. It
was one of several OM problems offered internationally to public and
private school students from elementary school through college.
More than 1 million students annually compete in some phase of OM
around the globe. In the U.S, depending on where students live, young
competitors may have to win school, regional and state competitions to
qualify for the international event. College and university teams
automatically go to the international competition known in OM circles
as "The Worlds."
The UD team chose the OM problem as a senior design project
because it presented a challenge and "we liked the way this one was
presented, stressing the aspect of working with the kids," Guglielmi
says.
"We liked the aspect of the free trip, too," Young said. "Of
course, we didn't know it was to Iowa at that point," he added, with a
laugh.
The mentoring aspect was Gruber's idea. He had maintained close
ties with some of his former UD professors, who readily accepted his
suggestion to have an OM team sponsored by DuPont.
Gruber, already coaching his daughter, Renee, on a fifth-grade
"Crunch" team for the Oxford (Pa.) Area School District, volunteered
to assist the UD team as well.
As a former teaching assistant who once helped organize the
mechanical engineering senior design projects, the idea was a natural,
he said.
In its mentoring role, the UD team visited the elementary school,
discussed various aspects of "Crunch," gave the elementary students
tours of UD engineering facilities and attended the regional OM
competition, where the Oxford team finished third.
"The mentoring helped," Gruber said. "The fifth-grade team was
able to increase its 'Crunch' weight from about 30 pounds last year to
170 this year."
The UD team, however, got 240 pounds on its structure before it
collapsed in the world competition...not as much as prototypes had
held in test situations on campus.
The experience of creating the product provided invaluable hands-
on engineering experience, Guglielmi said.
It gave the members a chance to design the structure on a
computer, factoring in its support ability and ability to withstand
impact; construct several prototypes; deliver oral presentations, and,
of course, complete homework assignments.
The four team members are now close friends, but they were merely
acquaintances when they were named to work as a team last fall.
Wilkins and Keefe try to put together teams that have a mixute of
gender, race, personalities and grade point averages.
Although they worked hard from October on, the final product was
finished "the morning we left," Smith said.
It was hand-carried on the flight to Iowa in a well-packed
shoebox, Swiderski added.
In an unexpected twist, high humidity resulted in a weight gain
of half a gram before the final competition began, making the
structure too heavy to qualify.
"First, we thought we'd have to take off some of the wood, but a
half a gram's a lot of weight," Young said. "We decided to try and dry
it out, so Ryan and I took it in the men's room and held it under the
hand drier. It worked, but we got some really strange looks."
Scores in from the competition were based on the amount of weight
a structure held, how well it withstood impact and the creativity of
the skit used to present the idea. That score was added to a team's
score from a "spontaneous" competition, where a short-term problem had
to be solved.
In the awards ceremony at the end of the week, tension mounted as
second and third place winners were announced. Then, hearing
themselves named as the champions, the team members did a sort of
spontaneous "crunch" of their own, collapsing under Gruber's group
hug.
Even before the competition, Guglielmi and Swiderski had jobs
waiting for them upon graduation-Guglielmi as a process engineer for
W.L. Gore and Swiderski at the Army Environmental Center at Aberdeen
Proving Ground.
Smith and Young have classes to take in the fall, but they said
one of their summer goals is to add the design project and OM victory
to their resumes.
-Beth Thomas