HBHA’s Destination Imagination team arrived home Sunday night from the Global Finals 2013 in Knoxville, Tenn., exhausted but proud of their showing. The team — comprised of Haidee Clauer, Julia Paul, Eliana Schuster, Simi Schreiber, Molly Kavanaugh and Mia Velasquez — finished in 40th place out of the 83 total teams competing.
Seventh-grader Haidee Clauer, who has been on the team since fifth grade, had a great time at Destination Imagination and described it as an amazing experience.
“The best part was being able to be there with all my friends and with Mrs. (Vickie) Sisco and being able to do everything together as a group,” Haidee said.
Sisco said she thinks the girls liked the culture of the whole event, “never knowing what challenges were around the corner.”
“I think the whole thing blew their minds. It was so much bigger and better than I think they could ever imagine,” she said.
In fact Sisco said the final standings were secondary to the entire experience.
“That’s the way the culture of the DI is. It was just a big celebration of the work we have done, all the team building that they created. Those girls are there for each other in so many ways — more than just problem solving as a team. They are there for each other personally and it was just awesome being with them through this journey,” Sisco said.
“It was such a valuable experience. They were a great dream team to be with. As a teacher/manager, it really was a pleasure to take them to this event.”
DI is often referred to as the world’s largest celebration of creativity. Its challenge program, the one the six girls competed in last week, is its most popular offering and is an international tournament for kids. At the start of the season, teams choose one of seven challenges. After weeks spent creating and developing their solutions, they go to a local tournament. Top-scoring teams advance to state or country tournaments. The top level of the tournament is the Global Finals — the world’s largest celebration of creativity.
The HBHA team won the Kansas state tournament, earning the girls the right to attend the Global Finals. They qualified once before, but did not have the funds to attend either of those times. This year an anonymous donor funded the trip.
The girls actually tackled their first challenge before the opening ceremony took place Wednesday night.
“It was rescheduled to Wednesday because we were originally scheduled to do it on Saturday and we had requested not to perform on Shabbat,” Sisco said. “There were lots of other groups who had to do it on Wednesday, too, because they had so many participants.”
The HBHA team didn’t score as well as they hoped on their first challenge, but Sisco said even though they weren’t given the official scores from the instant challenge (they finished 21 out of 83 teams in that challenge), their final standing shows they bounced back. The instant challenge, she explained, involved five balls placed on one side of a fence. The girls had to build a device that would pop the ball over that fence.
“They only popped one ball over the fence so they thought they did poorly. But as it turned out, a lot of teams didn’t get any balls over the fence,” Sisco said.
Except for Shabbat, the girls were at the competition the entire time. When they weren’t doing their actual challenges, Sisco said they had lot of “sciency” things they could do. One of the favorites was a Duct Tape Playground, provided by sponsor 3M. They were only able to go to the area for two 20-minute sessions. While there they got to help make Duct Tape pictures on the wall and wearable creations.
Haidee explained that they enjoyed helping to create the Duct Tape murals. Each began as an empty wall filled with squares. Participants could fill the squares with the appropriate piece of Duct Tape. As the week went on, more and more pieces were added to the mural.
“At the very end you could see the pictures and it was so cool. There were three pictures, the first was a clown fish, the second picture was a crab and the third was a sea turtle,” Haidee said.
Haidee said that she and her friends couldn’t make anything “that spectacular” in the 40-minutes they were allotted in the Duct Tape creative room, but she managed to make a skirt while her friends made a purse, belt and a hat that they wore at the Duct Tape Ball.
Teacher and parent Edna Levy also accompanied the group. She coordinated Shabbat activities. Sisco said they met with the local Hillel and spent Saturday relaxing in the Smokey Mountains.
“We walked around and picnicked and enjoyed the day,” said Sisco, adding that they had a special service in the mountains as well.
Levy also made sure the girls returned home with a special reminder from the competition. The girls could not bring the set they had shipped to the competition back with them, so before it was disposed of, Levy took tiny pieces from the curtains and made each girl a scroll filled with a cinnamon stick to remind them of the sweet smell of the Shabbat they spent in Tennessee.
Haidee couldn’t express enough how wonderful she thought the entire Destination Imagination experience was.
“It was a really amazing experience, especially in the opening and closing ceremony to be able to sit in the middle of this huge stadium and look around and see it filled with all these people. That was amazing.”
