Five kids sitting on a floor paddling invisible canoes. A detailed lesson on leaf-tailed geckos in Madagascar. A virus disguised as an office desk nameplate.
These are all products of the imaginations of some kids around here who are going places – to the Destination Imagination Global Finals in Knoxville, Tenn., specifically.
Destination Imagination is a nonprofit whose goal is to create the next wave of leaders and innovators in the world by blending the STEM disciplines with the arts and presenting them through performance-based challenges.
About150,000 students around the world participated in tournaments this year in order to compete on the world stage, and two teams from Bow and one from Concord have made it all the way to the Global Finals.
These finals really are global – 21 countries and 1,400 teams will be represented, so it’s kind of a big deal to have three teams from basically our backyard going down there to represent us.
Our representatives come from Bow Memorial School, Concord Christian Academy and Bow High/Derryfield – that last team is run outside of a single school and includes Bow high-schoolers from those two schools. They identify as BEEP – Bow Extracurricular Enrichment Program.
To find out what these teams would be doing at the finals May 25-28, we went and checked out as many practices as we could – we couldn’t make it to the BEEP team’s Saturday practice, but we heard all about it.
Teams choose one of six types of challenges: Get a Clue (fine arts), Close Encounters (improv), In Plain Sight (scientific), Musical Mashup (structural), Pace of Change (technical) and Meme Event (social learning). These are the Team Challenges, and they’ve been working on them all school year, and in same cases even longer.
Then, there will also be an Instant Challenge, in which teams will have no idea what they’re about to be asked to do on the spot, and do it in two minutes.
The point of all this is to get kids thinking and working together, being creative to solve problems, working under pressure and learning to speak and present in front of a crowd.
Plenty of that was on display last week.
At Bow Memorial School, the Noisy Narwhals team was putting on their own version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? The Narwhals chose the improv challenge, and it really does play out like an episode of that classic ‘90s show – the kids are handed a prompt and they only get a couple minutes to decide how they’re going to act it out.
These middle-schoolers really know how to think on their feet. “It’s all kid-generated ideas,” said team coach Mark Vincent. “We’ll give guidance, but everything comes from them.”
In fact, adult intervention is strictly prohibited at the competition. If the judges – or Appraisers, as they’re called – catch any funny business, penalties will be assessed. But this team isn’t worried about that because these kids have been perfecting their skits since October, and they’re pretty good at working things out on their own.
“They really step up” at competitions, Vincent said.
At Concord Christian Academy – student population around 200 – the Wowzers team was perfecting their science-based challenge. Watching them practice was like sitting in a college biology class – if you need to know anything and everything about the leaf-tailed gecko, this is the performance to watch.
This group features students ranging from third to seventh grade, and one of them – seventh-grader Emma Haddock – has been doing this for seven years.
“We were nervous going in,” she said, “but I think we’re going to do great.”
The BEEP team is the only high school team from our area. They work outside of school because the members’ schedules are a little too hectic to abide by the school’s rule of requiring practices to take place in school.
BEEP also chose a scientific challenge, and it’s based on a virus being camouflaged as a desk nameplate. It will make more sense when you watch it play out.
To help these teams hit their fundraising goals, go to gofundme.com/8xxh7mzw for the Noisy Narwhals and gofundme.com/yty2z83g for Wowzers.
