Help Howe Elementary get to Odyssey World Finals!

Hi Everyone! We are students at Howe Elementary, Mt. Lebanon. We have some exciting news to share - our team placed ✨️SECOND✨️ in our division at the "Odyssey of the Mind" Pennsylvania State Finals held on April 1st at Lock Haven University! We are now advancing to the World Finals in Michigan from May 24th - 27th, 2023!

Odyssey of the Mind (www.odysseyofthemind.com) is an international extracurricular program that challenges teams of kids to solve complex problems in unexpected ways. Our Team spent the last 6 months starting in September developing a solution to a multi-faceted problem, one among five unveiled for Odyssey 2023. We then presented our solution in the form of a skit, live, in front of an audience that included trained judges. No Outside Assistance is the central rule of Odyssey -- that means our adults cannot provide any help or ideas to us. However, this encourages us to brainstorm, design and create our solution and finally perform our solution all on our own. The trained judges at the competitions look for solutions that are well-developed, clever, and unexpected -- while still meeting the stringent criteria laid out in the problem. Our scores are reflective of our hard work, creativity and perseverance.

Our team wowed judges with our solution to "Problem 1 - Pirates and the Treasure" (the Vehicle Design Problem) at both the Western PA Regional and PA State Tournaments. We scored 2nd Place in Division 1 (Grades 3-5) at PA State Finals. For our solution, the team designed and created a pirate ship that can hold the weight of two team members, traverse a path from the Queen’s kingdom, fight a sea monster, retrieve a stolen treasure, and return to the kingdom bearing the Queen’s lost treasure. The team also wrote the script for an eight-minute long skit, created characters, designed costumes, sewed a Pirate character doll by hand and created a skit background, all from recyclable materials. This year while preparing our solution we not only honed our problem-solving skills but also learned valuable real-life skills which included safely operating power tools, managing a stringent budget, time management and self-organizing virtual meetings. Some of us even braved public speaking!

We are now the first Mt. Lebanon team since 2018 to travel to Odyssey of the Mind World Finals, which will be held at Michigan State University from May 24-27, 2023 and will be competing against winning teams from all over the world. For each Problem and Division, only the top 2 teams in the state are invited to the World Finals. Worlds is the highest level of competition available in this program, and this is only the 9th time since 2006 that Mt. Lebanon has sent a team to the World Finals.

Now we need your help to get there and showcase everything we have learned in the last two years. We hope this fundraiser will help cover our travel and accommodation for the World Finals. This will no doubt be a fantastic experience for us as students, individuals, and as a team. Thank you!

-- Aadit, Bryan, Charlie, Chrissy, Rohan, Roshan and Walker