Long term is often seen as the main attraction at competition, despite the fact that it holds the same weight as spontaneous for scoring. This is because teams spend the most time preparing for this performance (hence the name long-term). In Odyssey of the Mind, long term is a performance that demonstrates the solution to a given problem. Each year, there are five problems to choose from, each with their own specifications and challenges. Regardless of problem, however, there are a few things that every long term solution must abide by. First of all, every long term includes a skit. Some problems require more than just a skit, like a machine or a structure, but regardless of problem, there is always a skit involved. In each problem, the skit can be no longer than 8 minutes. Another similarity across the board is that each problem has a cost limit and additional requirements to make simple solutions harder to find and therefore facilitate creative solutions.[3]
Long term solutions take months to prepare because of their complexity and the scale of solutions. Teams have to create their own sets for their skits, their own costumes, and any props that they would like to use in their skit. They could, of course, buy all of these things, but that would hurt their score and most likely put them over their cost limit. So, not only do teams need to think up a creative way to solve the given problem, they also need to creatively build and present their solution. So, there is a lot of time spent brainstorming good solutions and good ways to create those solutions before anything is built.
Clarifications
Clarifications are an important part of OM and its lingo. When the 5 long-term problems are written, not all of the bugs can be ironed out of them before they are sent to teams. So, when teams get the problems and choose one, if they want further elaboration on a specification in the problem, they can send in a clarification. Clarifications are responded to in a fairly timely manner and the responses are sent to the team that asked for it. Additionally, some clarifications, called general clarifications are added to a clarifications page on the OM website so that all teams can be made aware of the changes [3]. So, some teams will start working on their solution and then they will check the clarifications and the specifications are completely different than they had originally thought, so they have to start over. Clarifications are important for teams to be able to know their boundaries and their problem before the first competition so that no one has the advantage of better understanding.