York House Returns to Destination ImagiNation Global Finals for Third Year in a Row
A team of Grade 8 and 9 students returned to the Global Finals for the 3rd year in a row. The finals were held in Knoxville, Tennessee from May 22 to May 26th.
Team members Anisha C., Julianna P., Nicole T., Marisa D. and Laura R. competed in two separate challenges: the team challenge for which they prepare in advance and the instant challenge which they are given 3 to 5 minutes to prepare.
This year, the team took on a technical challenge called “Assemble It”. The team had to build a delivery device that is used to transport parts and products during an 8 minute play. The parts are transported from the parts depot to an assembly area. Here they needed to assemble the parts into finished products and then deliver these to the delivery area.
Teams were judged on the creativity of their solution, the play and transporter, as well as the number of orders they successfully delivered.
Our DI team choose to create artificial hearts and pacemakers. The artificial hearts were made from sodium Polyacrylate, (Thank you Mrs. D!) vinyl gloves, elastic bands, and licorice sticks. The pacemakers were made from discarded milk bottle caps and plastic film containers.
The transporter was built from discarded bike wheels, left over wood and random supplies. It was powered by a cordless drill and driven by Anisha. Talk about creativity!
During the assembly process, the team presented an eight minute play which featured Laura and Marisa as the medical personnel who needed to save the life of “Denise” whose heart was failing. The patient Denise was a “onesie” filled with newspaper with a styrofoam head attached (some of you may remember Denise from her visit to school earlier this year). Anisha and Julianna were the “Time Brothers” delivery service. Nicole T. acted as an elf from Santa’s work shop moonlighting as an assembler in the “Time Brothers” warehouse.
In the Instant Challenge, the team was presented with a problem and given three minutes to read the instructions and arrive at a solution. Then they were provided with five minutes to implement their solution. For this challenge, the girls needed to rely on its creativity, communication skills and fast thinking. They completed this task with the 5th highest score out of 53 teams in their challenge!
Overall the team finished 17th out of 53 teams in their division. Even more impressive, this was a team of Grade 8 and 9 students who were competing against mostly Grade 11 and 12 students from around the world! To qualify for Global Finals, the team won the Regional and Provincial competitions where they beat Grade 12 teams from across BC.
Destination ImagiNation is the world’s largest creative thinking programme. Over 100,000 students participate in DI around the world. This year, a record 1,275 teams from 13 countries competed at Global Finals.
If you are interested in more information on DI or perhaps joining the team next year, please contact Team Manager Chamkaur Cheema at [email protected].
