Parents Love DI
Kids Love DI
DI is FUN!
DI Rewards Innovation!
DI Empowers Kids!
DI Teaches Creativity!
The kids have a blast thinking of imaginative ways to solve Challenges, and getting ready is half the fun! Brainstorming comes first. This is followed by writing, building, gluing and taping, testing and fixing, painting, sewing, and rehearsing.
We celebrate a job well done at Tournaments all over the world. Thousands of students of all ages and abilities display their creativity to a cheering crowd, while officials wear funny hats and Silliness is encouraged! DI teams show they can build nearly anything using cardboard, paint, hot glue, and duct tape! Until you see this for yourself, you’ll never realize just how much kids can accomplish.
You may not think your child would enjoy performing, tinkering with gadgets, or sewing costumes—but you’ll be surprised when you see the results!
When our Appraisers score a team’s solution, the creativity shown by the kids is much more important to us than how well it works.
Our Top Awards are given for having a unique approach, for risk taking, for innovative design or for outstanding creativity—but not for skill or talent, because that’s not what we value most highly.
In Destination Imagination, the kids are in complete control. Our most important rule is that each team has to solve their chosen Team Challenge without outside help, and the adults aren’t allowed to take over.
The team’s Solution is theirs alone and they take great pride in this. Most kids never take complete charge of a big long-term project until they’re much older, because the adults tell them what to do. In DI, these roles are reversed. The kids must make every decision, and the adults act only as facilitators.
We want the adults to teach new skills to every team, but the kids must decide how to use these skills to solve their Team Challenge. The kids are empowered in a way we seldom see in other activities.
Many believe that only a few gifted individuals are creative, and the rest of us cannot hope to match their abilities, but this is not true. Both children and adults can learn to be more creative, and anyone who has been involved in DI has seen it happen!
Our kids spend months working on their Team Challenge. They also practice and solve many Instant Challenges. While they are having fun doing this, they are gaining practical experience in creative problem solving—a powerful process based on more than 50 years of research that can transform the way in which children approach problems for the rest of their lives.
Click here to learn more about our Challenge Program