Putting imagination to the test
Local Destination ImagiNation teams find challenge at state championships
The Escalante Middle School "Durango Mangoes," Geoff Swarts (top), Alex Max, Andrew Wilson, Webb Wright and Ben Kenna (middle from left), and Andy Erickson (bottom), ham it up before the state championship competition last weekend in Denver. Last year, the team went to the Global Finals in Tennessee representing Park Elementary School./Photo by Ken Wright

by Ken Wright

Even if they're not advancing to the world championships, they sure had a great time.

Five teams from the Durango School District 9-R strutted their creative stuff last weekend in the Destination ImagiNation Colorado state tournament in Denver. In March, these 31 students earned the right to represent their schools, when more than 200 students from Southwest Colorado competed in the DI regional competition at Escalante Middle School. Representing Durango in Denver were two teams from Needham Elementary, and one team each from Riverview Elementary, Miller Middle School and Escalante Middle School.

Destination ImagiNation is a nonprofit corporation that offers kids of all grade levels, elementary through college, a team-based competitive alternative to sports and clubs. The program 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 are allowed only to organize, oversee and motivate the participants; the students must do all writing, research, technical creation, costume design and set construction.

Destination ImagiNation'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."

At the state tournament, held April 30 at the University of Denver, 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 six years of the Destination ImagiNation program, Durango has sent two teams to the world finals: In 2003 a group from Miller Middle School and in 2004 a team from Park Elementary reached the top event.

Even if Durango will not be represented in Knoxville this year, a team from Needham Elementary took home a "Renaissance" award for its creative talents.

"It's kind of different from school," said Danika Rothwell, 10, of the "Oregon Trailers," the award-winning Needham team. "You get a really good relationship with all your buddies."

Teammate Ellen Southworth, 10, agreed with Rothwell. "Every time it's different, and you get to use your imagination," she said. "It's different from school, because you're not just sitting at a desk doing nine-plus-nine."

Teams of up to seven members choose one of five "challenges" to work on over a period of several months. This year's challenges were:

- "DIzzy Derby," in which students design and build a vehicle that will race against the clock on a triangular track.

-"Sudden SerenDIpity," requiring the team to combine a story about serendipity with an invention the team creates.

-"Live! It's RaDIo DI!" Students write and act an original radio show with sound effects, commercials and a news bulletin.

-"IMPROVing Along," which asks students to create an improvisational travel game show based on some form of transportation.

-"DIsigning Bridges," which challenges students to build a bridge that holds weight out of wood, glue and fishing line, and employ that in a story of a "bridge" between two researched cultures.

Participants and spectators fill the DU hockey arena for the DI state championship awards where Needham's "Oregon Trailers" won a "Renaissance" award for creativity./Photo by Ken Wright

-"DIsigning Bridges," which challenges students to build a bridge that holds weight out of wood, glue and fishing line, and employ that in a story of a "bridge" between two researched cultures.

Competitively, each team solves two types of challenges for which they are scored: The "Central Team Challenge," the structural, technical or theatrical task from the above list; and a on-the-fly "Instant Challenge" presented at the tournament

"I think it's great," says Mike Quintano, the elementary facilitator for 9R's OWLS program for gifted and talented students, of the competition. His job includes overseeing DI by recruiting students at Animas Valley and Riverview elementary schools and coaching the adult managers. "It's a different form of competition, other than athletics. It gives more students other avenues to go."

Lynn Schneider, a manager for the Needham team that received the creativity award, was coaching for her fourth time. Three times she coached her son's team, which two years ago went to the Global Finals representing Miller Middle School.

"It's a great, nonacademic, creative opportunity," she says. "It teaches them to hang in there and complete something."

Also, she adds, kids have to negotiate their own roles on the team. "You can take what you like to do and get recognition for it," she explains. "My son likes to build robots, and he could do that. My daughter likes plays, and she can use that."

Les Sommerville, managing a DI team for his first time, found the experience a challenge for himself as well as the kids. His team, also from Needham, had to build a bridge that didn't weigh more than 150 grams, and then work that into a fictional script about the coming together of two cultures. His students chose to research the cultures of England and the Bahamas. They also researched bridges and then built one - which they had practiced - during their play. They then had to incorporate the breaking of the bridge into their play, and predict how much weight the bridge would hold at its breaking point.

"That was their favorite part," Sommerville laughs.

Although he couldn't offer creative input, his challenge, he said, was to "keep them focused and attentive over time." Sommerville found this task with fifth-graders to be very different from his usual role as a chemistry professor at Fort Lewis College. "Their outlook and energy level is amazing," he says.

That "outlook and energy" ultimately was the theme of the state championship itself.

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 game room. 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 - marked the DI participants from anyone else who might be wandering around campus. Even one adult "appraiser" - there are no "judges" - executed his duties with an enormous lobster hat on his head.

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 concert before the awards ceremony, after which indoor fireworks and hoots and cheers met the many awards handed out for the next few hours.

Alex Max, 11, from Escalante Middle School's Durango Mangoes, and a member of last year's Park Elementary team that won a spot in the Global Finals, perhaps summed up the real point of DI the best.

"It's so much fun," Max raved, even though his team received no awards this year. "You get to express yourself in so many ways. But the funnest part is hanging out with all your friends and having a great time."


 

 


 

 

 


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