This year, DestiNation Imagination, formerly known as Odyssey of the Mind, will be hosting its state competition in Sheridan at the Sheridan Junior High School on April 5. Students from around the state will compete in one of six competitions to demonstrate their imagination and creativity as they act out a solution to a prompt. Each prompt is simple and open-ended, with only three to four bullet points to guide a team, leaving considerable room for creative thinking. Students, in order to enhance their solution to the problem, must build a contraption or set using any materials that come to mind. The only restriction is the price limit for these materials which the participants must purchase themselves, a comfortable $175.

     Destination Imagination, or D.I., is an organization for the creative and the brainy. Students in groups five to seven pick a challenge in which they must solve the question in any method they want and then present it to a series of judges in the form of a skit no longer than eight minutes. The sky’s the limit when it comes to how the competitors can approach the problem, so long as they meet the few requirements stated in the instructional packet. Problems such as “Dig In,” a technical based challenge in which participants must build equipment to detect hidden objects, and “Laugh Out Loud”, which requires members to create live comic strips based on the art of a pre-researched artist, are just two challenges a D.I. team may choose from.

    SHS librarian LaDonna Liebreich is the team manager of Sheridan’s teams. Rather than a coach who tells the team members where to go and what to do, a team manager is more of a safety advisor because “there is a lot of chaos that happens,” but she says that “there are benefits from chaos.”

  Students learn good time management skills, as well as communication and people skills “because just like in the real world, you might not get along with the people you work with” said Liebreich. Working alongside teammates with opposing ideas helps kids work towards success in the competition and in the future. For more information see Liebreich in the library.