Three Destination Imagination teams are waiting to hear back with results after submitting their final challenges for the state competition in March. Results should be announced tomorrow.

Destination imagination is where teams must complete an instant challenge, where they must come up with it on the spot in less than 10 minutes, and a team challenge, where they have already been given their prompt and have a few months to complete it.

“We picked the scientific challenge, so ours was we had to research a scientific law, and then present a story in the style of a documentary about how that law is bent or broken,” freshman Rachel Reynolds said. “So we chose inertia, and how we broke it was we were in ancient Rome, and so it was similar to seatbelts on cars. And we had the chariot and the seatbelts but we took away inertia, so people were flying into a volcano, we definitely added lots of humor to our script.”

The whole process began in September when the challenges were released, and then in February the team had regionals, and then in March they competed at state.

“We put in a lot of work, this year we did a lot more, some years we would kind of do more lowkey work, but with this year we tried to go far,” freshman Xavier Leffler said. “I did the scripts, and then came up with ideas for the performance, I was the kind of like the brainstorm type guy. And then, we had other guys on our team that would do all the technical stuff, and Rachel put it all together and directed it, and helped everyone with everything.”

Due to COVID-19, the teams had to do everything virtually. They had to have team meetings over Zoom every week, and they had to perform over Zoom. For competitions they had to record their performance and submit it to the judges.

“They made the challenges easier this year because of COVID,” freshman Rachel Reynolds said. “I do like the video editing aspect of it this year because you can add special effects, you could use green screens, you can layer videos on top of each other with green screens so it looks like your group is in the same space.”

Destination imagination takes a lot of creativity, imagination, teamwork skills and quick thinking. It presents new challenges every year, which is why most of the competitors have done it for years.

“I really love the whole organization because you just get to think outside the box, and think on the spot and I feel like many times we don’t learn this in school,” freshman Sameeksha Jayaprakash said. “You learn a lot of important life lessons like public speaking and thinking on the spot and whatnot, which you don’t get to know in school so it’s a really good experience.”