Photo by Monique Schoenfeld, Town Crier
Sameer Chopra, left, and his mother and team coach, Shyamoll Chopra, demonstrate how the "mooning machine" that the Comets built operates. The machine will be used as a technical element in this month's "Odessy of the Mind" competition at Davis, where the seven-member team will compete.
Town Crier Staff Writer
Harker students go to Davis for State competition
Members of the Comets at Harker Academy in San Jose will have to cancel their after-school activities this spring. The seven-member team unexpectedly won first place for Division I in the regional "Odyssey of the Mind" competition this month.
The team will travel to Davis for the state tournament March 27 to compete against 230 teams. If the Comets win the state competition, they could advance to the nationals May 26 in Tennessee.
"Odyssey of the Mind" is a nonprofit organization that promotes problem-solving skills. Each competition requires students to work as a team to solve specific technical or practical problems as described in Odyssey's guidelines.
Shyamoll Chopra of Los Altos Hills, who coached the fifth-grade team, said this is the first year the school has participated in Odyssey
"It was a total surprise. We never thought that we would get this far the first time, so we weren't looking beyond the March 6 (tournament)," Chopra said. "The kids went ahead and signed up for other things."
As part of the competition, the team members are required to work on a long-term project in which they create a problem and a solution and present it in an eight-minute, original play. Teams receive points for performance, style, props, and how innovative their solutions are.
Chopra said the Comets' project needed to involve a customer, a sales team and a sales transaction. The students created a play set on the moon in the year 4000, she said. Neil and Buzz, two customers who deliver oxygen to Mars, buy a faulty interplanetary travel transporter. Since they cannot deliver oxygen, the lives of those on Mars are in jeopardy, and the sales team must come up with a solution.
Chopra's son, Sameer, who helped write the play, said the team chose a futuristic setting because, "It's easy for us to work with. No one knows what the future's going to be like or what's right or wrong. We figured if we already build space stations on the moon now, in 2,000 years we should be able to go from the moon to Mars."
Team members also had to include a technical element in their play - a device that could perform a task without the physical aid of any team members. They created an ATM machine - called the "Mooning" machine - out of blocks, a motor and gears. The machine can actually dispense coins, or "moonies," Chopra said. The students could spend no more than $100 to build the device, according to contest rules.
Chopra said the students have spent most of their weekends since October canvassing thrift stores for props and studying about the moon at the local library.
"It was total trial and error," Chopra said. "Even until the last day, they were adding things to the script. They used so much paper, I don't know how many trees they killed."
On the day of the competition, students will also compete in a spontaneous competition round, where they must brainstorm to find a solution to a specific problem within a set time limit.
"The whole event is to encourage kids to take risks without fear of failure," Chopra said. "A lot of time grown ups don't take risks. We get conservative. There's lots of good ideas that get lost."
When asked if the project took a lot of work, Sameer said, "Oh, yeah." But he plans to be on a team again next year, he said.
Comet team members include: Sameer Chopra, Andrew Wei of Los Altos, Erika Chow, Amit Mukherjee of Mountain View, and Jessica Luo, Arjun Iyer and Jackson Davis.
For more information about "Odyssey of the Mind," go to www.odessey.org.