Imagine a world where it was the kids who ruled, where parents were forbidden to help in any way other than general teaching – and only then when requested by kids; a world where the solution is secondary to the process of getting there; a solution where teamwork is truly encouraged to the point where having a dominant ‘superstar’ can lose the competition for your team; a world where kids are encouraged to think, imagine, and create.  Welcome to the world or Destination Imagination.

According to the official site:

Destination ImagiNation is a place where kids take what they know and what they are good at and learn to apply it to solve challenges, working together and cooperatively with a team and pushing the limits of imagination to best not their competition, but themselves.

Destination ImagiNation is a community-based, school-friendly program that builds participants’ creativity, problem solving, and teamwork in enjoyable and meaningful ways.

Teams of five to seven members work together to apply creativity, critical thinking and their particular talents to solve a Team Challenge.

The Destination ImagiNation Team Challenge is a Challenge that is solved over a period of eight weeks or more. There are five competitive Team Challenges from which teams may choose, each with its own educational focus. Each Team Challenge is designed to be open-ended and solvable in many ways and on many levels.

Challenge A: Technical/Mechanical
Challenge B: Theater Arts/Science
Challenge C: Theater Arts/Fine Arts
Challenge D: Theater Arts/Improvisation
Challenge E: Structural & Architectural Design

There are two parts to the Team Challenge: the Central Challenge and Side Trips. The Central Challenge is a set of required elements that all teams must complete. Side Trips are two additional elements teams create and include in their Presentation.

The Destination ImagiNation Instant Challenge is a Challenge teams are asked to solve in a very short period of time at their Tournament, without knowing ahead of time what the Challenge will be. Teams go into a room and are given a Challenge and the materials with which to solve it. They use their thinking-on-their-feet skills to produce a solution, usually in a period of five to eight minutes!

I got involved with the program four years ago, when the folks who were sponsoring the program in town looked to get the lower elementary kids involved in the new non-competitive challenge.  I immediately learned two things – first that I really liked the program and being a manager fit very well with my personal style, and second that I was rare in that regard.  That first year I learned a lot, as did the kids on the team and the lower elementary school (the team was made up of first and second graders).  I had the only team that year, but the success and word of mouth of the program was tremendous and has spurred much greater involvement.  Indeed, I took some personal pride that whereas my team was only one of four representing our town four years ago, this year we got an award for bringing the most teams to the regional competition!

Each year in the late summer we discuss with our kids what activities they want to be involved in and which ones they will drop.  Each year Destination Imagination is at the top of the ‘keeper’ list.  And starting last year we had a new addition – my wife!  That was amazing in itself – during the first year I had permanently banished her to the kitchen since she couldn’t enter the room without the words ‘what if you … ‘ exiting her lips.  That is called ‘interference’ in DI lingo, and is strictly forbidden.

The best part about this whole thing is watching the kids think, brainstorm and create.  Someone said during the first training I went to that the kids will *never* do what you think they should – and it is pretty much true!  For me that is one of the best parts of the experience!  As an example of how this works, last year they had a challenge called ‘CSI DI’, where the CSI stood for ‘color, sights, and illumination’, and they were required to use light creatively to illuminate something in their solution.  So for my part as an engineer with many year experience in Optical Physics, I could see about a dozen ways to solve the problem.  But all I could do was to teach them about wavelengths, reflection and refraction, filters, lenses, optical fibers, and then let them play with the large pile of optical components I’d accumulated through the years.  Their solution ended up flashlight-based to save ‘cost’, but they produced some cool effects with color filters, polarizers and a microlens array that helped them come in fourth out of twenty-two teams.  Watching many other teams and reading the judges’ feedback told us that they had absorbed much of what I taught and turned it into an innovative solution – one that was all theirs!

This year once again saw changes in the team membership, with four members returning and two new members joining – and they decided to do an improvisation challenge.  Improv for DI is tough stuff – sure you don’t have to build much, but you are scored tough according to how you make use of the resources you have.  At competition, the team is given some items 30 minutes prior to presenting the solution and have to work most things out.  Then they are given another major component one minute before presentation of their solution, and a final element is presented during the presentation.  The year is spent researching the lists of possible items that will be part of the challenge as well as learning various improv techniques and other dramatic elements – and also working on the ability to work as a team effectively and efficiently.  Considering how bad kids can be at decision-making this is no small task.  Think about it – I had a group of fourth and fifth graders making an entire short play within half an hour including dialogue, setting, plot and characters, while keeping things flexible enough to accommodate the elements presented later.

This has all made for an amazing and very different year.  And, as I mentioned previously, tossed in the middle of this was the realization before Christmas that my family would not be in Massachusetts by the end of the school year – and the very real probability that at least I would be in a different state by the time their competition rolled around.  Which is exactly what happened.  Some of the parents were completely amazed that we decided to keep the team going and stay involved – and of course in retrospect having all of us involved in a competition three days before a truck arrived to spend two days boxing and shipping our lives to another state does seem a bit crazy.

But the bottom line was that this was the best team I have had in four years – and my wife and I decided as soon as I started interviewing out of state that we would stay until the kids competed no matter what.  They deserved no less.

So they went into the competition on March 29th feeling pretty good that they knew their strengths and weaknesses and how they related to scoring – their ability to create interesting stories and characters was superb, their improv skills were finely honed, their sound design abilities were incredibly variable (from brilliant to tragic depending on the day), they had solid knowledge of most of the facts they needed, and they had an uncanny knack for picking up the second challenge during presentation before they were all ready to deal with it.

They also knew that only two kids were any good at building stuff – and those two were not the natural leaders of the group.  That had resulted in some mixed outcomes in the past, but at least they were aware of that limitation.  That could become an issue if their ‘instant challenge’ was a structure challenge – this is separate from the main challenge they have worked on all year; they go into a room and have five or so minutes to come up with a solution.

On competition day their main challenge came first.  They are shown to a ‘studio room’ a half hour before presentation and were handed some information and set off to work.  I got to sit in the room but not say a word to them.  Sound hard, it is – normally I would help with time and remind them about teamwork and so on without directly interfering.  Fortunately things went well – they were a wonderful team to watch.  When they came out to do their presentation, there were some definite mistakes – they forgot one of their sound themes, they still picked up their second challenge to soon and some other minor stuff.  But they had the audience laughing throughout and had a blast themselves.  We were very proud of them!  It is interesting for parents – this is a ‘drop off’ activity, and all they ever see is ‘end of night chaos’, so seeing their kids in action is always a revelation.

Around lunch time we got our ‘raw scores’ and they looked OK, but not great.  The comments from the judges – they write on sticky notes as they watch – were all very positive and highlighted all of their strengths, so the kids felt pretty good about things.  Their Instant Challenge took place in the middle of the afternoon and they brought my wife in for that.  Twenty minutes later they came out – they are not allowed to discuss it with anyone out side of the team until after Global Finals in May since all of the challenges are pulled from the same pool.  But my wife whispered to me “it was as if they were allowed to design their own challenge”!

Opening ceremonies were promptly at 8AM, and closing ceremonies followed a line-up and parade and started at about 6PM – so this is a very long day!  The teams are seated by town in a big gymnasium with parents and friends in the stands, and after an extended period of handing out thank-you awards to volunteers and the host school, they get into the business of the awards for each challenge.  There are 3rd, 2nd and 1st place and the first place winner goes on to the State Finals.  So after sitting through a couple of other challenges (and also finding that our town sent more teams to the regional competition than any other despite having only 10,000 people), they finally came to our kids’ challenge.  They started with the third place – and our kids were ready.  They were ready for 2nd or 3rd place and would have been happy with either.  However, they were very disappointed when they didn’t get 2nd or 3rd, assuming that meant 4th place at best.

If you couldn’t already guess, when the call went up for 1st place, it was their team that was called.  We were all shocked and thrilled – the kids jumped up and got their ribbons and the information packet for the state final tournament.  For my wife and I that was when reality began to set in – we would be making a 6-7 hour drive back after just three nights in our new house, a house that would still be full of boxes and that would just be starting to feel like home.  We would be transients in a hotel yet again.  We really didn’t want to do it … but obviously we wanted the kids to enjoy this moment and opportunity, so we booked a hotel near the competition site the next day.

Here we are now, a week and a half later, getting ready for the trip back to Massachusetts.  Another family is spending the night in the hotel, so the kids will get a nice visit before the competition.  And from there?  We have our times and places, and know that if they win they go to the global finals in Kentucky in May.  And apparently Region 3 (our region) is very strong, placing loads of teams into the global finals on a yearly basis.

Here is our team photo: you can tell my wife and I, and the center and right of the bottom row are our older and younger son respectively.

With us luck this weekend at the State Finals – and at this point that pretty much means doing well enough to be proud but not so well that they go to Global Finals!

Tags: Misc