Wisconsin Destination Imagination Affiliate Tournament comes to UW-Green Bay
By Janelle Fisher
City Pages Editor
There’s no telling what you might see on campus at UW-Green Bay this Saturday, April 1, as teams from across the state gather to compete in the Wisconsin Destination Imagination Affiliate Tournament.
Starting as early as September, teams of up to seven students ranging in age from elementary to high school picked from a list of challenges released by Destination Imagination (DI) and began preparing for tournament season, when they will compete against other teams in their age group who chose the same challenge.
There are six challenges for teams to choose from — a technical, scientific, fine arts, improvisation, engineering, and service learning challenge.
Each challenge comes with its own set of requirements, but the sky’s the limit when it comes to how a team chooses to meet those requirements.
Affiliate Director Mary Bykowski said DI offers kids an opportunity to just be kids, which isn’t always so easy in today’s world.
“I think, to me, it would be so hard to be a kid in this day and age,” she said. “When I was a kid, we played outside in our yard until it was dark outside in the summer or until someone said it’s time to eat. And we didn’t have electronic devices, which led us to have a much bigger imagination because we didn’t have other stuff that does it for you… So to have kids being able to do whatever they want, for the most part, in this program and not having people think you’re weird — because weird is a good thing here — it doesn’t get better than that. They get a chance to be a kid again. They get a chance to imagine again.”
One of the ways DI fosters imagination, Bykowski said, is by letting kids lead the way.
Longtime team members know the cardinal rule of DI is “if it doesn’t say you can’t, then you can” — meaning that teams can solve their challenges in any way they like as long as the final product meets the requirements of the challenge and is entirely team-created.
Team managers and parents are more like supervisors than a guiding force. They can teach skills and ensure things are done safely, but are not allowed to give the team any ideas about how to solve its challenge or do the work for the team.
“It’s a totally kid-driven experience,” Bykowski said. “They’re not allowed to have outside interference — which is sometimes really hard for the team managers and their parents because they always want to put their hands in there… Kids need pride in what they do because it’s 100% them and to have someone else help just breaks down that whole team composition.”
That kid-driven nature is what Bykowski said sets DI apart.
“There are not many programs offered that do not have outside interference or outside assistance,” she said. “I think that’s what separates Destination Imagination from a lot of other things.”
If a DI team wants to do something, the team members have to figure out how to do it themselves, which Bykowski said leads DI kids to learn skills that will help them later in life — even if they don’t realize it at the time.
“We have kids that taught themselves computer coding because they wanted to make this thing do this, this and this and they took that on themselves,” she said. “They taught themselves to do those things or they looked for outside sources that could help them learn those things… If you’re a 17-year-old kid and you learn to sew, guess what? That is something pretty huge because when you tear those jeans you’re wearing, who’s gonna sew them? They might think it’s silly at the time, but going forward, they don’t… As they get older and a little more mature, they look back going, ‘you know what? That wasn’t so bad after all. It was kind of smart.’”
Bykowski said learning those skills also helps build confidence in DI participants.
“The confidence that you get from being able to do these things on your own and with your peers is just a huge confidence level,” she said. “It feels like, ‘if I can do this…I can certainly do much better in other things.”
Not everything a DI team sets out to do will pan out as they had hoped, but Bykowski said that is an opportunity to learn about how to cope with things not going according to plan.
“We always tell the kids that failure is not a bad thing,” she said “It teaches you not to just quit on something that doesn’t work. It’s about looking at ‘okay, why didn’t it particularly work? We’ve got to figure out why this didn’t work if we want this particular thing in our challenge.’ It really drives kids to research and dig deep into things and collaborate with other people in their thought process and learn to be team players.”
Teamwork is an especially important part of DI.
At each level of competition, every team is presented with an instant challenge where teams are given a challenge on the spot and scored not only on how well they complete the challenge in the given time and with the given materials, but also on how well they work together on a team, which Bykowski acknowledged is not always easy.
“Especially for younger kids, that can sometimes be a real challenge because they’re all about me and ‘my thoughts are the best and yours are okay, but we should do mine,’” Bykowski said. “And so sometimes for younger kids it’s really hard to work as a team and learn as a team, but it’s amazing the things I’ve seen over the course of 22 years about how [DI] changes children.”
Bykowski shared a story from a former DI participant which demonstrates the lasting impact of skills learned and practiced in DI.
“One of our alumni that went into the service after high school, into the army, they were doing an exercise at the boot camp he was at that he ended up telling us about when we ran into him a couple years later,” she said. “There was a river that ran at the end of the camp and they had an exercise where they gave us a bunch of materials and we had to build some sort of floating object that would get our team across the river in an amount of time. He said it was like instant challenge time all over again, just on a bigger scale. He said ‘my team and I rocked it.’ Within a half hour they were across the river, and the other teams were just sort of staring at them, like ‘what are they doing?’ And he said, ‘this is a DI thing.’”
The problem solving and critical thinking skills which DI cultivates in its participants, Bykowski said, sets them apart from their peers.
“In anything, whether in college or in your future employment, you can be miles ahead of everybody in the way you look at a work issue or even personality issues,” she said. “Problem-based learning is a huge skill in your life because you’re using that same direction of thinking towards most of what you look at in your life… You are like a future employer’s dream when you come into their workforce.”
As a volunteer-run organization, Bykowski said DI in Wisconsin exists because people have seen what it does for kids in setting them up for successful futures and keep coming back to support that mission.
“This is a volunteer organization, and I can name so many people in it that have done [DI] for over 20 years,” she said. “And they just still keep doing it in some way, shape or form because they believe strongly that kids really get a benefit out of it.”
At the sectional tournaments occurring around the state throughout February and March and at the affiliate tournament this weekend, those experienced volunteers are joined by former DI participants who have graduated and returned to give back to the program.
Those alumni, Bykowski said, are a valuable resource.
“We want to utilize our alumni in the higher ranks of the organization because they know what it’s like,” she said. “They’ve been through it.”
Bykowski said the rate of retention DI has for participants-turned-volunteers is another thing that sets DI apart from other organizations.
“There’s things around here that people might have participated in, but do they go back and volunteer for them? Not a lot,” she said. “But in this organization (DI), we depend on our alumni.”
At DI tournaments, alumni can often be recognized by the red ties many wear as a fun reminder of how they’re tied to DI.
Anyone curious about DI is encouraged to come check out the affiliate tournament, Bykowski said.
“If you’re into DI and you want to come and see it or you’re interested in maybe being on a team, [the state tournament] is something to come watch,” she said. “You might not get it right away…so we’ll have snippets of the challenges and people around helping and video monitors up with everything and anything you could want to know about DI.”
The culminating event of DI each season is Global Finals, where the top teams from around the world come together to compete in a multi-day celebration of creativity
Teams that qualify at the affiliate tournament will have the opportunity to advance to the global stage of competition, but Bykowski said she and the rest of the Wisconsin DI crew work hard to make the affiliate tournament just as special.
“We want to model it and kind of make it our own version of Global Finals, because we realize that not a lot of kids will get the chance to go to global finals,” she said. “It’s like the Olympics of DI. You can come and see the best of the best and you can come watch other teams from all over the state and see the solutions that they came up with… You’re never going to see the same thing twice.