After being champions of the national competition, seven Columbus School’s students are preparing for their new challenge in Destination Imagination by attending their first international tournament.  

Destination Imagination is an extracurricular activity where the students choose a project to work on the entire year. After accomplishing some challenges they go to a competition to see which group had the best creative idea.

“It’s an activity that kids do after school and is based on creativity, engineering, literacy and all sort of different disciplines coming together. They try and complete this different projects and then they go to a competition where they put their projects against other schools to see who had the most creative solution to the project problem,” William Stanton, 4th grade teacher and champion of the national tournament, said.

There are six different projects students can choose including, engineering, fine arts and improvisation. Stanton´s group worked on improvisation where students worked hard so they could be the best and more creative group.

“Students did some research on some history, science, and stuff and then in the competition they are given a skit and they have to improvised the skit with the information they studied,” Stanton said.

After winning the national competition in Cali, Colombia, they were invited to go to Tennessee, USA to participate for the global competition.

“For the competition we have the same skit so we have been practicing again. I will say that we are a little nervous because we did well in the Colombian one but this one is international so there will be really good competitors,” Stanton said.

Any student who has been in Destination Imagination has dreamed of becoming the champion of the competitions.

“I was in third grade when my group won the national competition in Bogotá, Colombia. We worked on improvisation the whole year and my dream was to win the global competition. I didn’t realize how tough the competition was, I felt very disappointed when we lost,” Elisa Aristizabal, 8th grade student, said.

Is really challenging to be in the global competition due to the amount of students that participate and the amount of creative ideas each group have.

“There’s going to be like ten thousand students, fifteen different countries so it is a pretty big event. So we are going to go just for fun and it will be a good experience for the kids,” Stanton said.