This school year Balmoral School was fortunate enough to start up a new program called Destination Imagination. Destination Imagination is a worldwide program that was started years ago but has only been in Winnipeg for the past few years. This was the first year that the Interlake School Division was represented at the provincial tournament. Balmoral Elementary entered two teams into the provincial tournament which was held March 13th and since we were the first teams to enter from ISD, it was pretty special for us!
Destination Imagination’s mission is to empower youth through project-based challenges that are designed to foster creativity, critical thinking, communication, and team work skills. These challenges build students’ confidence while providing them with the necessary skills for the 21st century workforce. There were seven challenges for teams to compete in this year. Our teams chose to complete the Fine Arts Challenge, called “Game On” and the Engineering Challenge called, “Monster Effects”. Each set of challenges has a number of criteria that need to be met. Over the months leading up to the tournament, our two teams worked together to create all of the necessary components to meet all of these criteria for their challenge. This included building a structure, researching games, and creating props, scripts, and costumes. Students also had to create a story-line for their challenge in order to bring all of their criteria together. Destination Imagination takes pride in their challenges, knowing that only students work towards completing them. This means that as team managers, we could merely guide students towards meeting their criteria for each challenge, not tell them what to do. Each challenge is student-centered which makes Destination Imagination incredibly rewarding to be a part of. It’s amazing to see what students come up with!
At the tournament, each of our teams presented their story-line to a panel of appraisers where they were scored on all aspects of the criteria for their challenge. They also had to compete in an Instant Challenge, where they showed off their teamwork skills to complete a quick design-based challenge within five minutes. Both teams competed against other teams from various schools around Winnipeg. Both teams did an incredible job at the tournament! They took pride in their challenges and showed sportsmanship towards the teams they competed against. We look forward to what next year has in store!
in: School Events