Destination ImagiNation is the World's leading creativity program featuring student-driven results in Challenges based in creativity, problem solving and teamwork. It teaches kids to think on their feet, work as a team, and devise original solutions to solve the challenges. Over the past several months, thousands of teams from Elementary to University levels, presented their Challenge solutions in regional and State tournaments worldwide. Select teams advance to the Global Finals. Over 10,000 of the world's leading creative students took part at the Destination Imagination Global Finals at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN, between May 20-23, 2009. This is an annual celebration where fun, creativity, and the talent of the world's future leaders are on display!
 
There are generally five or six challenges.Each challenge is geared to showcase talents in Theater arts, Improvisational acting, Structural engineering and Technical design & Construction.
 
A team of six 4th and 5th graders from the Norman E. Day School in Westford, MA, were among the 30 teams from Massachussetts who qualified to compete at the Global Finals last month. led by Team Manager Savitha Rajiv, the "DIe Hard Dominators" Rohit Rajiv, Rama Mannava, Pranav Nanga, Rohan Shah, Kartik Singh & Jack Cusworth, won the regional tournament held at the Chelmsford High School in March, placed 1st at the State Finals held at WPI in April. The team competed against 48 other teams from all across the US, Korea and Columbia, and placed 2nd at the Globals Finals in Knoxville, TN!
 
Their challenge was called "Operation Cooperation", a technical & construction challenge. Their task was to build two machines, one was a manned machine, a machine that could carry the weight of a person, and the other was an unmanned machine, a machine they could not touch. The two machine had to cooperate and work together to perform a maximum of 12 defined tasks. The tasks included tying a knot, stacking objects, one machine release an object while the other machine caught it, one machine had to tow the other machine, lift the other machine and others.
 
The team used a power drill to power a tricycle for a manned machine, and built a circuit with motors and switches for the unmanned machine. They completed a total of 10 tasks at the tournament. The team had to choose a country other than their own and represent this country in their solution. They picked Brazil  as their country to represent with the World Cup Soccer theme. In addition to building the machines, they performed a story around this theme. They also had to showcase their talents in two sidetrips. For their sidetrips, they made a cooperation quilt, and built the Statue of the Christ the Redeemer, a famous statue in Brazil. The statue was built out of trash materials like cardboard boxes, paper towel rolls, and plastic pots.
 
They had to solve their challenge on a budget of $175, and present it in 8 minutes. Another integral part of the DI is the Instant Challenge or the IC. It accounts to 1/3 of the total points at the tournament. Basically an IC is a challenge that the team is presented in a closed room at the tournament. They will have about 5 to 8 minutes and a few basic materials like straws, labels, toothpicks, indexcards etc, to solve the challenge.
 
With a total of 325 points out of a maximum of 400 points, the DIe Hard Dominators won the 2nd place. They were presented with silver medals and a 2nd place trophy.  Bang Elementary School from Huston, Texas came 1st.
 
For more information about the program, please visit the website at www.idodi.org. For the Global Finals website, visit www.globalfinals.org.

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