Destination ImagiNation™ is the world's largest non-profit, volunteer-driven organization devoted to helping kids gain practical life skills through interesting, entertaining and mind-boggling challenges. Our community and school-based program begins in August/September when the year's Challenges are issued. All the challenges are designed to follow the educational standards.
Teams of up to seven students choose their challenge and work for months developing their solution. Volunteer team managers (parents, teachers or community volunteers) facilitate the group, but cannot give technical or other assistance. Kids are empowered to design, produce and present all of their own work. Teams present their solutions at regional and state tournaments, which demonstrates to teams that there are many ways to solve the same problem. High scoring teams may advance to the ultimate creativity showdown, Global Finals, held each May at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Instant Challenges teach students to respond quickly to an unplanned event by requiring them to solve a fun, surprise challenge on the spot. Teams must work together to quickly assess the situation and generate a creative response within just a few minutes.
Central Challenges require teams to utilize each member's skills in such diverse areas as art, writing, technology, performance, engineering, and music to create a unique solution that can take from several weeks to several months to develop. Students learn to work together as they practice project management skills by meeting deadlines imposed by tournament dates and completing their solution within a specified budget. Teams present their solutions before a live audience and panel of appraisers. Scoring is based on criteria specified in the challenge, which usually includes analysis of the team's innovation, risk-taking and teamwork. Teams may also choose to be Non-competitive.
Destination ImagiNation™ is inclusive and inexpensive. A school membership costs $135 for a team or $390 for up to 5 teams. Each team pays $60 to register for state tournaments. Memberships are encouraged to offer the program to all interested students. In fact, student participation is usually only limited by the number of adults willing to serve as team managers. Considering the benefits Destination ImagiNation™ offers, it is certainly one of the best values in enrichment education today.
Massachusetts currently has over 1000 teams of students (k-12) participating from over 300 schools and community groups. We have 10 regional tournaments statewide held each year in March and a State Finals held at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA.
For a preview of this year's challenges and more information on how to get involved, go to www.madikids.org or call Barbara Mann at 978-462-0472.
