By Nance Ebert, Contributing Writer
Northborough – A team of seven students from the Marion E. Zeh School represented Massachusetts and came in 11th place at the Global Destination Imagination (DI) Tournament in Knoxville, Tenn., at the end of May.
This has been an exciting journey for Adrien Moulin, Jonah Sagarin, Elliott Fang, Mason Drew, Ashlyn Moore, Nathan Spadafora and Danielle Spadafora.
“Destination Imagination is a worldwide group that begins in elementary school and continues into the high school,” explained team leader Shari Spadafora. “The group’s task every year is to pick a challenge to solve from six provided by Destination Imagination. These challenges can be technical, fine arts, scientific, structural, improvisational, or service learning in nature.”
The Northborough team selected a fine arts challenge called “Get a Clue” in which they presented a mystery story involving a horse named Seabiscuit. They created all of their own scenery to reflect the time period, the 1930s, during the Great Depression. In the performance, the horse is stolen by one of three suspects and the DI judges choose one of these suspects to be the thief. Then the team is tasked with creating the remainder of their performance based on the judge’s choice. They also created a working lie detector that was used to question and uncover the “bad guy”. Each performance is choreographed to be presented in eight minutes or less.
At each tournament, the students were also given an Instant Challenge, a task that has to be solved within minutes and presented to the judges.
“It’s all fun, especially performing and seeing how we did,” Jonah said. “It was cool how we combined the gangsters and horses to come up with our time period.”
The team won the Regional Tournament in March that was held at Nashoba Regional High School in Bolton, which allowed them to advance to the state finals. In addition, they won the Spirit of DI Award for outstanding teamwork and spirit as well as the Renaissance Award for outstanding design, execution and performance. At the state tournament they were one of three teams chosen to go on to the global finals to represent Massachusetts.
Destination Imagination imparts the students with many important life skills. They are solving problems, creating solutions, performing in front of a group, meeting deadlines and working together cohesively.
“I love DI because it’s always cool how we combine seven people’s ideas into one solution that works for everyone – amazing!” said Nathan.
“I like the challenge of solving different puzzles and problems each year,” added Elliot. “Anything can happen. We can come up with wild ideas.”
“This is such a wonderful organization. It empowers children and gives them confidence,” Shari Spadafora said. “DI makes kids independent and teaches them to speak for themselves. As the team leader, my only function is to facilitate meetings. I am not allowed to help the kids with their solutions. They need to problem-solve, create their own scenery, script, costumes, etc. In this case, they actually made their own working lie detector. My job is to drive them around to stores to pick up what they need.”
Photos/submitted