Students from Reston's Terraset Elementary School won the Ranatra Fusca Award at the 2014 Odyssey of the Mind Regional Tournament on March 8. The Fusca Award acknowledges the effort, exceptional creativity and teamwork displayed by a team in completing its project.
The Odyssey of the Mind format allows teams to compete among specific challenge topics. According to Odyssey officials, the Terraset team, including Kathleen Russell, Olivia Purvis, Ethan Boswell, Caleb Waller, Noah Davidson and Edyson Powell, showed "exceptional creativity in the concept and delivery of the Driver’s Test problem." The team, coached by Katy Boswell, developed their project with knowledge gained from a unit in their elementary school science curriculum. They constructed a vehicle designed for ant drivers. Unique to the design was a GPS which they identified as a "Global Predator System," which warned the driver of predator anteater hazards. All of the costumes worn by the team members, along with large leafy fenders on the vehicle's sides, were hand sewn by the students themselves. The team also fabricated the voice element of the GPS from a recycled birthday card with a recording mechanism.