Destination Imagination challenges St. Regis student
Secret Agent Angus MacGyver is stuck in an elevator. All he has with him is some duct tape, a paper clip and his trusty Swiss Army Knife. What does he do? Picks up the elevator phone and calls team Destination Imagination for help of course!
Destination Imagination is a national program where school kids learn how to create extraordinary things from ordinary objects. They participate in hands-on activities that fosters creativity, courage and curiosity through academic challenges in the fields of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), fine arts and service learning.
At the beginning of this school year, the St. Regis schools administration was looking for a program for their gifted and talented students. And with a Gifted and Talented grant from the Office of Public Instruction, the school was awarded $3,000 to cover expenses over the next two years to start their own Destination Imagination team.
The school hired Chera Antos, who recently moved to St. Regis from Washington. She moved to the area along with her children and husband, who also teaches at St. Regis. This past fall she put together a high school and junior high team.
The high school team members are Anna Sanford, Madison Hill, Madison Kelly, Emma Hill and Cole Wickham. The junior high team members are Andrew Sanford, Kylee Thompson, Zane Antos, Jakob Lohman, Keanan Taylor, Makaela Kelly and Ian Farris. The program is also hoping to add an elementary team in the near future.
In August of each year, Destination Imagination releases seven new challenges, pertaining to different subject matter areas that a team must solve. The challenges are designed to enable students to develop 21st Century skills, including teamwork, perseverance, self-directed learning, courage and leadership.
The teams meet once a week in order to prepare for regionals. In one challenge, they were tasked with creating a tower made of only paper and craft sticks. They had a few minutes to discuss their strategy and a few more minutes to build it. Then, they are judged and scored by the height of their tower, their creativity, and teamwork.
“Another challenge was to build a tower out of given material that could rest on top of a balloon long enough to be measured,” explained Antos, “they also had an activity that consisted of four mini challenges, in which they had to use the materials provided to move a ball into several positions and then create a silent play about the “life” of the ball during the challenges.”
All of these ‘exercises’ helps to prepare the teams for regional competition which will be held in Frenchtown on February 27. From there, winning teams travel to State competition in Dillon in March. Winning teams then get to go to the Global competition held in Tennessee in May. At the Global event over 1,400 teams from around the world compete with over 16,000 people in attendance.