On Saturday March 15, Beachwood’s destination imagination team placed first at the regional competition held at BHS.

According to freshman competitor Amanda Wasserman, this is the first time Beachwood has had a high school destination imagination (DI) team.

The DI team consists of four freshmen: Julia Warner, Andie Cohen, Amanda Wasserman and Yuke Zheng.

The competitors, who were involved in the activity in middle school, find that it requires a great deal of creativity to write and perform the skits.

During competition, each team chooses one of six open-ended challenges and prepares a skit to teach the assigned concept. According to the DI website, each of the challenges focuses on a category such as technical, scientific, fine arts, improvisational, structural and service learning.

“Each of the challenges is developed by a team of educators and industry experts who target a particular area of the curriculum and its related standards of content and performance,” the web site reports.

The activity is very open-ended, according to Cohen.

“DI is about using your imagination to create your own props, write your own skit and to solve a problem,” she said. “You choose one of six challenges with a set of guidelines you have to follow, and that’s about it. The rest you make up with your team.”

At regionals, Beachwood’s team chose the scientific challenge and performed a skit involving Scooby Doo and the gang solving an underwater mystery. Fish were disappearing from the ocean, probably because of a giant squid monster. The gang piled into their submarine and found the giant squid was actually Daphne in a suit. Daphne said she made up the mystery because she was nostalgic for the old days when the gang was together.

According to Cohen, once the team has chosen a challenge, the work has only just begun.

“We work together to figure out how we want to write the script, and what props we want to make,” she said. “It seems pretty easy until you actually have to make everything come to fruition.”

The team made their own rolling backdrop and used it to give the illusion of being out at sea in a boat. They made fish and their own submarine. The team even made a squid costume with moving legs out of felt and fabric.

To make the skit come alive, the team wore costumes. Wasserman wore an orange shirt and red skirt to play Velma, Zheng wore a green shirt and khakis to play Shaggy, Cohen wore a purple shirt and skirt to become Daphne and Warner wore a brown sweatsuit with black dots to become Scooby.

According to Warner, each team performs twice per competition, a “central challenge” that teams prepare for months leading up to the competition and an “instant challenge,”  which is an improvisational skit that competitors prepare on the spot.

“The scores from your central and instant challenges are combined for your total score and the team with the most points wins,” Warner explained.

First and second place teams advance from regionals to states, and the top three teams from each state competition advances to the global tournament.

“We do have three competitions,” Cohen said, “regionals, states and global finals with a month or two in between to give teams an opportunity to improve their skits or props based on how they performed and to ‘up your game’ against other teams.”

During competition, DI teams are unable to get help from anyone, even from a coach.

If there is any help from outside the team, the team will be disqualified.

“If a parent helps you put things together, paint, write a script of anything of that sort, you will be disqualified if the judges of the competition find out,” Cohen said.

Warner explained that without the help of parents, the team would not be able to compete.

“My mom is our team coach, and I’d like to give a big shout out to her,” she said. “…also a shout out to [Cohen’s] parents for letting us use their house to build some of our stuff…. also Mrs. Lewis, who teaches at Hilltop, [and is the] coordinator and our D.I. representative.”

“Supervisors are parents, and they stick around to make sure we don’t strangle each other,” Cohen explained.

“They also give us food,” she said. “So I’m not complaining.”

Although winning is nice, Wasserman explained that DI is about more than getting a trophy.

“The object of the competition is to learn new things, work together and problem solve,” she said.