Spontaneous Attack!

We had the pleasure of having four of our participants attend the Odyssey BC Spontaneous Attack session at South Slope School in Burnaby.

We were greeted by the friendly Odyssey BC volunteers, registered and the kids were moved to our first station, with Bruno as chaperone. Sarah, as part of the coach training, was taken to a station to be partnered with an experienced coach/judge and was put immediately to work running and judging an activity.

Our first station was, I think, a little surprising for our kids. It was more formal than anything we've yet to do in practice, with the 'judge' giving them a copy of the problem description, and then reading out the situation and rules. I was a little worried that the kids might be discouraged or overloaded given the stopwatch, the rules of turn-taking, and the complexity of the problem. I employed what I've been told over and over again: "coach- be quiet", took a deep breathe and watched.

They got it. The 'judge', an experienced coach, was very warm and engaging. She made suggestions, gave examples, and lots of encouragement. Everyone thanked the judge and moved onto the next of about four stations.

From this point on I only saw bits and pieces as I was on baby-watch duty, but Xavier and I did take a peak at all of the stations. There were situational scenarios (given a picture, "what might happen here?"), creative story telling, prop creation, and a structure problem (which looked to be a lot of fun.)

Each 'judge' gave constructive feedback both to the team and the coaches, which I'll try to summarize below:

• coaches can teach the teams strategies for these problems:
  
  
  
  • get a book of spontaneous problems
    
  • check out the Pennsylvania Odyssey web site
    
  
  
• often very successful teams assign members roles such as: timer, reader, builder, coordinator, artist, rules checker/scorer
  
• during a problem, if needed, the team should figure out and assign any efficient divisions of labour; eg for a structure problem that has re-usable projectiles, assign a couple of people to quickly retrieve and return them to the 'launcher'. It may not be as much fun, but the team will generate more chances of getting higher scores.
  
• showing and encouraging team spirit and teamwork
  
  
  
  • having a motto/chant
    
  • encouraging talk to each other
    
  • let every one take roles and turns
    
  • work together; create one solution, rather than one per team member
    
  • watch the rules
    
  
  
• Prioritization: figure out the key point-scoring tasks, get these done first, then do the extras
  
• problems are often structured so that each team member must give an answer; if they get stuck, the whole team is stuck. So coach the kids to have two default answers to fall back to if they have a blank.
  
• listen carefully, and try not to fidget when problem descriptions are read out
  
• speak clearly, and with good volume when talking to judges and other officials
  
• if a team has more than five members, pre-decide who will be the five to do the challenge
  
• use thinking time and the time while others are having their turn to figure out your next answer
  

Given that our participants are both first timers, and young, they did themselves very proud; at times it wasn't easy, but nobody gave up, and everyone listened to the feedback from the people running the stations.

At this point I'd like to say thanks to Bruno for driving and supervising the kids at and between the stations, and also to the wonderful Odyssey BC volunteers and organizers for putting together and running such a great session.