My 12 year old niece had her Destination Imagination tournament this past Saturday. It's her third year of participating in DI. Every team who participates in DI is required to provide at least one person to volunteer as an appraiser. My husband and I have been nominated as their volunteers. This is my third year appraising and it's the second year for my husband.
What is DI? "Destination ImagiNation is a place where kids take
what they know and what they are good at and learn to apply it to solve
challenges, working together and cooperatively with a team and pushing
the limits of imagination to best not their competition, but themselves." This quote is from the DI website. It's open to kids of all ages. Teams work on the challenge they have chosen for months before the competition. They don't get any help from adults. The challenge that we appraised this time was launching ping pong balls or tennis balls at least 8 feet into a receptacle. Then the balls had to get back to their originally location. While all of this was going on, they had to perform a skit that tied into the coming and going of the balls. It's amazing what the kids came up with. There were so many different solutions to this problem.
My niece placed second in her category. Her team choose to do an improv challenge. Her team also won a DiVinci award. She will be competing at the State tournament next month. My husband and I won a 'Spirit of DI' award. We will be along to appraise again. This is such a great organization and the whole family has fun doing it. I would highly recommend this to all kids.
