Students at Cooperstown Central School have embarked on a voyage of invention. Their hard work will be put to the test at SUNY Oneonta this weekend.

The Odyssey of the Mind is time-intensive and imparts a sense of confidence and creative problem solving, said program coordinator Maureen Culbert, a teacher at Cooperstown Elementary School.

Students are given two problems, one of which is long term, the other short.

"For the long-term problem they have time to prepare," said Culbert. "A lot of kids sign up and we lose them because they don't realize how much time is going to go into it. They meet once a week from October until the competition in the end of February. The adults can't guide them. They can only help them along with ideas the kids come up with exclusively."

Chris Giovine has been a team leader for three years. This season he's taken on a middle school and an elementary school team. Idiom Inspiration is the long-term problem chosen by the middle school team, one of six from Cooperstown competing in an all-day event on February 24 at SUNY Oneonta.

Idiom Inspiration falls into the classical category, which pertains to language. In the past, Giovine has coached a team tackling Shakespeare.

"They had to take ten lines of Shakespeare and incorporate them into a play they'd written themselves," said Giovine. "It all had to make sense and be quite logical."

So it is with this year's problem-taking classic English idioms and putting them into the context of a play, written, directed and acted out by the team. As if that wasn't enough, they're taking it a step further by inventing a few idioms of their own. The five girls worked together, revising the script until it was completed. Coach Giovine kept all the drafts along the way in case the judges ask to see how the play was changed over time.

Based on their strengths and interests, teams choose from classical, structural or movement problems. Ody-see-ing Sounds, Giovine and Rosemary Craig's elementary team, are faced with the challenge of coming up with a device that produces sound effects. Combined with the fact that the sounds have to logically complement a play the students wrote, four months of practice suddenly doesn't seem like very much.

But the kids have pulled it together.

"They know their lines by now," said Giovine. "They've written a play about a clumsy knight who has to rescue a pair of princesses. There's a bunch of sounds associated with him breaking into the castle. Then he finds out that they're airheads, and there's some sounds associated with that."

Greg Giovine, a fifth grader on the team, said that Odyssey of the Mind is fun.

"You have to work with other people," he said. "You have to create things and ideas, and act out your part. You have a responsibility to remember your lines and costume."

The sounds for the play come from a device built by students from an old chair and tubes, connected to buzzers, bells and radio sounds. Two rows of four holes are punched through the chair's plywood seat. At the right moment, a lever is pulled and a marble falls-through the hole, down the tube, to activate the sound effect.

Timing, said Giovine, is everything.

"This really gives the kids a feeling of confidence," he said. "They work together in this group and they see that problems can be solved. It teaches them to think creatively without the real guidance of adults. The format is always a skit or a play, so they have to face the fear of public speaking and stage fright. They become more articulate. It's not just for brainy kids, either. It brings out the creativity in every kid."

The short term problems are spontaneous. Giovine and Culbert both used the same example of the kind of cleverness that could result in bonus points. The participants will be given an object or a color, take green, for example, and they have to name as many things as they can that fit the description. They get points for answers like grass, trees and bottles, but if they give a particularly crafty response, like envy, they can garner double or even triple points.

If they win at Oneonta, the next stop is a competition in Binghamton. Last year, two Cooperstown teams went that far. After Binghamton is the world competition, but so far CCS hasn't had a team reach this level. After only four years of participation in the Odyssey of the Mind, they've seen the number of participating students rise. There are seven teams this year.