Destination: Denver

Kids Find Challenge and Fun at Destination ImagiNation State Championships

By Ken Wright, 5-01-06

I just got back from a weekend in Denver, where my daughter and five of her friends competed in the state finals for Destination ImagiNation. Even if they’re not advancing to the world championships, they sure had a great time.

Destination ImagiNation is a non-profit corporation that offers kids of all grade levels, elementary through college, a team-based competitive alternative to sports and clubs. The program, which operates world-wide, is based on multiple-intelligence creativity, problem-solving and teamwork, and puts full ownership of executing the challenges in the students’ hands, as no adult input is allowed.

Adult team managers – of which I was one for my daughter’s team, along with another mother -- are allowed to only organize, oversee and motivate the participants; the students must do all writing, research, technical creation, costume design and set construction.

The program’s written goal is “to teach students the things they’ll need as they traverse the sometimes rocky and often challenging terrain of the school of life … how to tap into their own creativity, how to solve problems, and how to work together in teams.”

Competitively, each team solves two types of challenges for which teams are scored: The “Central Team Challenge” is the structural, technical, or theatrical task that they take the months before the tournament preparing; also, at the tournament itself, each team is presented a problem-solving “Instant Challenge.” These kinds of puzzles are practiced, but they must be tackled on the spot, with the purpose of “thinking on their feet, becoming comfortable with quick decision making, and further developing the team spirit,” according to DI guidelines.

Specifically, the “challenges” created by the program target brainstorming, project organization, time management, creative and critical thinking, knowledge application, collaboration, presentation skills, confidence, and research skills. The design of the “challenges” are “based on the concept of divergent thinking – understanding that there is more than one way to solve a problem,” explains the program’s website.

Teams of up to seven members can choose one of five “challenges” to work on over a period of several months. This year’s challenges were:

· “Back at You!,” in which students design and build a device that will deliver and return a series of balls.

· “Kidz Rulz,” requiring the team to change a rule of nature, create an illusion that demonstrates the new rule, and perform a story about that rule.

· “How’d tHAT happen?” Here students write and act out an original play that integrates research on a foreign country, shows how a magical hat transforms a character, and creates a “bizarre happening” through some technical device.

· “On Safari,” which asks students to research an environment and six creatures that live in that environment, then create a skit about a safari in that environment.

· “Inside DImension,” which challenges students to build two weight—bearing structures that fit together, then integrate them in story about a famous architect as told by one of his or her creations.

Students spend three or four months preparing for regional competitions, held in March; then, if they advance to the state tournament, they put another month into honing their skills and skits.

At the Colorado state tournament, held on Saturday, April 29, on the University of Denver campus, teams competed for a chance to go to Knoxville, Tenn., at the end of May for the DI Global Finals. There teams from 47 states and 15 countries will meet to show their creative talents. In the seven years of the Destination ImagiNation program, Durango has sent two teams to the world championship (including my son’s team in 2004). This year, a team from Durango’s Riverview Elementary also advanced.

My daughter’s fifth-grade team didn’t make that jump to the next level this year, but that didn’t get in the way of their having a grand time at the state championships. The Durango teams shared a hotel in south Denver with dozens of other teams from around the state, and much of the time before and after the tournament was a loud and friendly kid festival in the hotel’s pool and corridors.

The tournament itself was held on the DU campus, where all kinds of wacky attire – kids dressed like 1930s private eyes, in turn-of-the-century golf outfits, in self-designed team t-shirts, and sporting all sorts of colorful and goofy hats (even one adult “appraiser” – there are no “judges” – executed his duties with an enormous lobster hat on his head) – marked the DI participants from anyone else who might be wandering around campus.

The Saturday night award ceremony celebrated the “spirit of DI,” as well. Held in the DU hockey arena, the hundreds of students huddled on the floor and spectators filling the stands were entertained with a pop-music DJ before the awards ceremony, after which indoor fireworks and hoots and cheers met the many awards handed out for the next few hours.

And on the six-hour drive home the next day, in our car my daughter and her friend slept – happy, challenged, proud, and tired.

As kids should be.

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