Thomasville City Scholars Academy Odyssey of the Mind students are sponsoring Creativity Night to promote imagination in the community on Friday from 4:30 p.m.-7:30 p.m. on the Scholars Academy campus.

Sharon Cernogorsky is the instructor of the Creative Thinking classes which participate in Odyssey of the Mind (OM) competitions. Cernogorsky describes the event as a “celebration of the creative arts” that showcases the potency that belongs to creativity and how creativity expands minds. All students, relatives, and members of the community are welcome to attend.

Cernogorsky has coached OM teams for 22 years and has organized community events like Renaissance Fairs and Creativity Night to help raise funds for OM teams throughout her years working for Thomasville City Schools. Cernogorsky’s students can be credited for hosting and creating the “Life-Sized Games” event in Downtown Thomasville last fall.

OM teams have a plethora of activities planned, such as a talent show, silent auction and dinner. Numerous artistic activities are planned, such as learning to create sculptures and constructing wax wicks from the participant’s hand. All events support the OM teams and give planners and participants ways to expand their creative minds: something all Odyssey of the Mind students must possess and display in their competitions.

There is no fee to enter Creativity Night. The Barbarito’s fajita dinner costs $10 and other activity fees range from $1 up to a maximum of $5 for tie-dying a shirt.

Students hosting the event get as much out of it as the participants because Cernogorsky allows the students to synthesize their own ideas for the events that will be offered. The students are not merely volunteers running the event; they are the creators and producers. Students and Cernogorsky choose and create events, assign committees, and then those committees organize and plan the event, occasionally asking Cernogorsky if plans meet the budget and is viable.

Cernogorsky’s students hosted a workshop for “Spontaneous” competitions last year, and now they are excited to again host Creativity Night. New events, new minds, and new students encouraged Cernogorsky to revive the event and make it the best one yet.

Student and participant Cameren Rogers, producer of the talent show portion of the event, describes OM as a “creativity competition…with a vague problem with generally vague components [that] your team must think outside the box…and expand on concrete details.”

Rogers also said that OM has taught her about her artistic side and has expanded on her ability to think on symbolic and metaphoric levels to compose a creative and viable solution with “fluency, flexibility, and elaboration” to any problem in life when one possesses a budget and deadline.

OM is a program inspired to develop and showcase creative minds of students and encourage the growth of deductive reasoning. Each solution presents a challenge that dictates months of group effort and preparation. Students of Cernogorsky have reached World Odyssey of the Mind competition three times, which is the highest level of competition for the team where they compete against teams from foreign countries as well as fellow states.