The Odyssey of the Mind team comprised of Campolindo students placed 11th out of 49 teams in their division at the world championships. The event took place at Iowa State University from May 28-30 and included over 800 teams from all over the planet.

Despite not placing in the top six, team captain Omid Boozarpour was still extremely pleased. “11th is a big deal, especially at the level they were competing at. We had a lot of great competition,” he said.

The team had to solve the problem titled “The Not-So-Haunted House,” and according to freshman Navid Boozarpour, it was a complex problem to solve. “Our problem had a lot of requirements. We were supposed to create a haunted house environment, so some sort of place that’s supposed to be scary and we have to have 4 mechanisms that go off and they’re supposed to scare someone. The person that you are trying to scare has to have some sort of reaction other than fear,” he said. A surprise ending was also a requirement.

Their skit included a father and a dare-devil son who loved to skateboard. In order to scare his son out of skateboarding, the father took him to a haunted house. However, nothing frightened the son, to his father’s disappointment. For the surprise ending, the father is told by a therapist that he, in fact, is schizophrenic and his son is simply a figment of his imagination, his inner child.

Overall, the team scored about 153-155 out of 200, excluding their score for style. According to Navid Boozarpour, the scoring at world tournament was only slightly different. “Definitely the scoring at world is tougher than the other tournaments. Going into world we definitely expected to get lower scores,” he said.

Style is a weak area for Boozarpour’s team because they are primarily “technical people,” he admitted. “We aren’t really as much artists as we are builders.”

Navid Boozarpour, freshman Austen Li, and Omid Boozarpour all agreed that the most exceptional performance from their problem was a group from Singapore. “We saw the performance from Singapore, and they were incredible, they were really good,” Omid Boozarpour said.

“They had very, very nice props painted extremely well and very complicated stuff, so they scared us,” Navid Boozarpour said. Despite an exceptional performance from Singapore, a team from Pennsylvania came in first.

“The toughest part was right before our performance one of our mechanisms, which is a crucial part of our performance, broke down and we had to fix it in less than 30 minutes before we performed,” Navid Boozarpour said.

Team captain Omid Boozarpour found that the most stressful part of the week was trying to keep the entire team focused. “The toughest part was really balancing having fun and meeting new people and actually doing the work that we did to get there,” he said.

The team stayed in dorms at Iowa State University, which allowed them to meet other teams from all around the world. “It was a lot of fun, met a lot of people, played a lot of frisbee,” Navid Boozarpour said.