 | | | Moraga Rotary Club Team C members and coach, from left: Navid Boozarpour, Anshula Srivastava, Omid Boozarpour (coach), Meera Ramesh, Jake Oxendine, Maya Ramesh, Ming Qian, and Austen Li. Photo provided
| | | | | | Every year the Moraga Rotary Club sponsors teams of all ages from local schools to compete in Odyssey of the Mind, which is designed to test creativity and intuition by giving teams open ended problems and challenging them to create unconventional solutions.
The Moraga Rotary Club Team C, a team of eighth-graders from Joaquin Moraga Intermediate School, successfully competed against 15 other teams and took second place in their division for their problem, "ARTchitecture: The Musical," March 2 at the San Francisco Bay Regional Tournament in Concord.
The competition consisted of two parts: spontaneous and long-term. For a team to win it must be fairly strong in both aspects. Teams decided on a long-term problem in last October and worked on their solutions, in this case an eight-minute skit, until early March. The Spontaneous section requires the team to solve a simple problem on the spot without any preparation. They took first place in the spontaneous portion of the regional competition by a large margin, boosting the team to second place overall.
Reflecting on the competition, the team coach, Omid Boozarpour, a junior at Campolindo High School, stated: "Over the course of the season we had some struggles, at one point I wasn't even sure that they [the kids] were going to finish. But in the end they pulled together and got the win."
The second-place win qualified them for the state tournament held last Saturday in Brentwood where the team won a top slot, and a chance to compete at the World Finals held at Michigan State University in May.
The team would like to thank the Moraga Rotary Club for sponsoring them for many years.
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Lamorinda Weekly, Moraga CA