Destination Imagination is a global think tank to promote learning, creativity, and STEAM concepts to children and adolescents around the world. Every year there are new competitions that each team chooses and work for the whole year to build up to their presentation. These challenges range from building your own theme park attraction to imagining a world where one scientific law was broken. There are three levels of competition: regional, state, and global. 

My team competed globally four times in the secondary level (high school students). We did challenges in scientific, technical, and fine arts areas. Throughout these challenges I learned countless new technical skills from coding and building robots, wood working and fabrication, costume design, writing, acting, and improvisation.

This year's challenge was to create a story about a trickster with some kind of technical element. For our solution we created a play about a magician family reunion. There were three characters that were all different types of magicians, one card trick character, one psychic, and another who actually had magical abilities. We framed our story around which character got the last slice of pizza around the table. They each used their different trickster abilities to try to get the pizza until finally the magical character revealed their abilities and ultimately got to eat the pizza slice.

This year's challenge was to explore what the world would look like if one scientific law was broken. We decided to break the first law of thermodynamics and explore a world where energy could be created. Our story focused around a character who was trying to go big by making a perpetual motion device to create infinite energy. He meets a powerful being who decides to let him do it. Our technical element was a device that imitates a particle accelerator. It used the weight of a water bottle to power the spinning particle which then used Arduinos to release other particles emulating the creation of energy.. The story explores why creating energy may cause a lot of problems due to the rule that entropy always increases, the more energy there is in the system, the faster things will heat up and go bad.

This year's challenge was to create a technical device that solved a world problem. We chose pollution as our world problem and created a story which we performed on a 10 foot rotating stage with an interior and second floor. We decided to tackle pollution by creating a robot that sorted recycling from trash. We used Arduinos to create a robot that looked a little bit like R2D2 from Star Wars and that would conduct multiple tests on each piece of garbage that you put in to determine whether it was paper, metal, plastic, or otherwise. Then it would use this information to sort the garbage accordingly. We framed our story around building this device. The main character moved to a forested planet and met a tree who was deathly ill due to all of the trash that surrounded it. Then, with the help of the environment and creatures of the planet, the main character built the robot and began cleaning up the planet. (This year's competition was interrupted after our regional performance by the Covid-19 lockdown and we competed globally online)

This year's challenge was to create a story within a popular game. Our team, being comprised entirely of nerds, decided on Dungeons and Dragons. We had to make our entire performance able to be contained within one box (as if it was a game itself). We created a story of a new adventuring party experiencing their first time playing Dungeons and Dragons. There were two sides to our performance, one in the real world of the players, and the other in the game world. The two worlds interacted when at the end, the players encountered a beholder which beat their characters and then entered the real world as well.