In this particular problem, students were tasked with designing, building and operating an all-terrain vehicle and centering a performance around it for an audience.

Going down the entry ramp of the basketball arena, what would normally be a media room for post-game interviews turned into a creative space for kids to work on their projects.

In that room, a group of eleven-year-olds from Washington Elementary School in Millburn, New Jersey tended to the scattered balloons, painted cardboard boxes and vibrant plastics that made up their project.

A project that included a function propulsion system, something that was "a challenge," the group said.

But to get on campus last week was no easy feat. The students first had to place first or second in their regional competitions back in New Jersey and achieve those placements once again in the state competition to be invited to the world finals.

They’d been working on their project since the fall, sometimes meeting up multiple times a week outside of school.

Still, the journey has been fun.

"I got to meet a lot of new people in my school," said Natasha Gupta, one of the competitors from New Jersey, after taking a break from the rather organized process of building a functional vehicle. “And in the world now there’s so many different cultures and people, and it’s really awesome to watch everyone’s performances.”

The group ran into a couple issues along the way, namely with which problem they were going to do and how they were going to approach it. They also needed to make sure all the teammates were on the same page.

They also found that, sometimes, things simply wouldn’t work out the way they thought it would.

"You choose something, and it doesn’t work out the first time, so you have to do it again and find the errors and start correcting it," competitor Evan Li said.

Coaches, while present at the event, were not allowed to assist the kids in any way, according to the group's coach.

Similar events were taking place all over campus, one of them being in the lecture halls of Wells Hall, where various groups were waiting for their school's name and city to be called. Once called, they’d be shown to the back door and into the next room where they had to be prepared for literally anything.

The students, ranging from kindergarteners through high schoolers, were about to take part in the spontaneous challenge, meaning they were entering the challenge completely blind with zero preparation time.

Regardless, many of the students were not visibly nervous. While waiting to be called, some of the older students sat towards the back as the younger ones, a group of students from Hong Kong, instead spent their time in the lecture hall-turned-waiting room passing around an inflatable ball.

"This is, for a lot of kids, a place where they can really express themselves," said Beth Nelting, while wearing decorative headwear to match her homemade skirt and disco ball earrings. 

While she’s normally a judge at Odyssey of the Mind, having been in the program for 22 years, Nelting spent her time at MSU with the kids, entertaining and keeping them calm throughout the assiduity of the events.

But for her, one of the best parts of Odyssey of the Mind is seeing kids come together from all over the world. Nelting said it’s exciting to see them get the opportunity to experience different cultures and backgrounds.

In particular, students performed dances for each other. At one point, a few began doing the Cotton-Eyed Joe at the front of the room. Behind them, a large strip of paper covered the chalkboard where students wrote messages.

One of the messages read: "Read banned books."

After completing the spontaneous problem, the students exited out into the Wells Hall courtyard, where they were greeted by a cheering human tunnel made up of their peers, fellow competitors and a person from an elementary school in South Korea dressed in an inflatable Captain America costume.

Elsewhere on the sidewalk, students traded various enamel pins they’d collected during the competition.

Since the event has multiple divisions split up by age group, there were numerous winners to receive trophies in the closing ceremony on Sunday, where over nine thousand event attendees packed into the Breslin Center.

One award, the Ranatra Fusca Award, is given yearly to a team or a person in the competitions who takes an extreme risk with their project, said Joan Coates, a former judge who’d been attending the world finals since the mid-1990s.

Coates said the award was named after a problem designed by the program’s founder, C. Samuel Minklus, who tasked his students in the 1970s with crossing a river without getting wet, and no further directions.

Some students created a type of water scorpion (Ranatra Fusca in Latin) to cross the river as opposed to a regular boat. The problem is said to have inspired Minklus to start the competition as well as the yearly award.

The competition has been running for 40 years since, having been hosted at Michigan State University seven times prior to this year.