GC students find their creative side with Destination Imagination
By Cara L. Dempski
GLENWOOD CITY — “Quick!
I need someone to write and perform a skit communicating coded information with a set and costumes made entirely of recycled materials!”
Does that sound like an odd request?
Maybe it is to some, but not to students who participate in Destination Imagination.
If you have never heard of Destination Imagination, or “DI,” then there are several six-person teams of students in the Glenwood City school district who probably would not mind telling you all about it.
Julie Anderson, the mother of three DI competitors and one of several coaches for Glenwood City DI teams, said the program has really started expanding the past couple years, and even moved into the high school during the 2016-2017 school year.
Destination Imagination challenges are for students in elementary school all the way through high school, and push student competitors to engage their critical thinking and STEM skills to find creative solutions for different types of challenges.
The challenges change from year to year, and students competing in the 2016-2017 school year could choose from technical challenge, a scientific challenge, an engineering challenge, a fine arts challenge, an improvisational challenge, and a service learning/project outreach challenge.
Two of Glenwood City’s 10 teams this past year made it all the way to the DI Global Competition held in Knoxville, Tennessee, May 24-27. That tops the district’s 2015-2016 achievement of sending a team to the international-level competition for the first time.
Anderson said each team’s ultimate goal this past year was to go to Tennessee. She said she was happy to see how the program has grown and changed since she first started coaching four years ago.
“I love that it’s growing this way,” Anderson said. “Our biggest fight is getting people to volunteer to coach. It’s a time commitment, but it’s so worth it.”
Destination Imagination
Destination Imagination’s website says the program is “a fun, hands-on system of learning that fosters students’ creativity, curiosity and courage through academic challenges.”
The challenges offered each year blend STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education with the arts and social entrepreneurship. Participating students learn patience, flexibility, persistence, ethics, respect for others and their ideas, and how to collaborate on solving problems.
Each year, DI works with educators and industry experts to create seven different academic challenges in the STEM fields, the arts, social entrepreneurship and early learning. Students then work in teams to research, design, and build a solution to their chosen challenge.
There are no limits, other than benchmarks used for scoring at tournaments, so competing teams can create objects anywhere from elegant in their simplicity to processes that would make Rube Goldberg himself turn green with envy.
Destination Imagination also has a non-competitive way for young students to get involved. Children between three and six years of age can participate in the “Rising Stars!” program, which allows the children to engage in many of the creative problem-solving tasks presented to their older counterparts without diving immediately into competition.
Team participants receive only minimal assistance from their adult coaches in competition. The website indicates the DI challenges are about allowing kids to create things on their own without help from adults or non-team members.
Parents and coaches, however, are encouraged to share their skills and talents with competitors. Learning new skills can assist teams in solving a challenge.
Competitions are at the local/regional, state and global level. This year, Glenwood City’s regional was at Baldwin in March, and the state competition was in Madison in April. The two teams who traveled to Tennessee for globals competed against teams from 45 states and 14 countries.
All students competing at the global competition do so speaking only in the English language.
Glenwood City DI
The two Hilltopper teams who made the trip to Knoxville at the end of last month were the Miner Survivors, who competed in elementary-level “Show and Tech,” and a middle school team named Wikkee Wikkee DeJaysah who competed in “Vanished!”
The Miner Survivors were challenged to present a show including an opening act and a headlining act. The team had to build a stage on which the acts took place, and that could move a team member from one location to another. They also needed to enhance each act with a technical effect to amaze the watching audience.
Finally, the Miner Survivors had to create and present two team choice elements to show off the team’s interests, skills, areas of strength, and talents.
The team finished 22nd out of 57 teams with a score of 285.30. First place went to the One Sound and One Vision team from Nanjing Zhiyuan Foreign Language School in China.
The middle school team, Wikkee Wikkee DeJaysah, flexed their creative muscles as they experimented with different types of artistic media and theater arts. The students performed a play they wrote and for which they designed all the props.
The “Vanished!” challenge required students to research the meanings, roles and uses of colors and present a story about how the disappearance of a color changes the world. Teams solving this challenge had to create a colorful character involved in the color’s disappearance, and use technical theater methods to create a vanishing act.
The teams were also required to include two team choice elements in the performance.
Wikkee Wikkee DeJaysah finished with a score of 249.47 to take 37th out of 58, and were bested by first place team E.I.E.I Octopi out of West Linn, Oregon.
Anderson expressed her fascination with some of the solutions teams can come up with.
“It is interesting to see the kids, even when they’re presenting an idea, because you get a mental image of what you think it’s going to be, and the finished product turns out nothing like what you had in your mind,” Anderson said, laughing.
For instance, this year’s high school team created a medieval castle and costumes almost completely from recycled materials for a skit involving an evil queen, a kidnapped sister, and a map allowing people to be guided through the castle’s secret byways.
Everything was made by the students participating in the skit.
And that was all before they had to take on their instant challenges.
Instant challenges require teams to be quick on their feet, as they do not learn what they will be challenged with until the day of the competition.
“It can be anything from acting, to building, to communication, or even a combination of the three,” Anderson said.
She said she tried to provide instant challenges for the three teams she coached this year to prepare the students for having to be resourceful when competition time arrived.
Anderson’s three children are all members of Destination Imagination teams at Glenwood City. Her eldest, Nyah, is a freshman in high school, but has only been involved since sixth grade. It was Anderson’s middle child, Elek, who got the ball rolling in the family, and his younger brother Ilan followed suit.
Once Nyah noticed how much fun it was, she decided to join in the fun and has not looked back. She joined with a few of her high school peers in 2016-2017 to perform a “Vanished!” skit. In fact, one of Nyah’s teammates competed in DI for the first time last year as a senior, and it was thanks to her younger sister’s team going to globals in May 2016.
“She loved it so much, she plans to come back next year to serve as an appraiser (judge),” Anderson said. “Until you’re down there, and see what these kids can achieve, you have no idea how fun it can be.”
Anderson said coaching is an incredibly rewarding experience, even when she is spending time keeping her young team from getting hurt. She mentioned that, no matter how hard she tries, someone gets burned by a hot glue gun at least once yearly.
“I swear, it’s like a badge of honor with them,” she laughed.
Right now, the mother of three is hoping there will be a new school advisor soon, since she has some ideas on expanding the program to include more students who would like to exercise their creativity without taking on the competitive element. She also is hoping more parents get involved.
“So many people want their kids involved in it,” she finished. “We can’t do that without people stepping up and volunteering.”