Destination Imagination (DI), an educational nonprofit organisation from the US, has launched a series of challenges for students in the run-up to a regional competition being hosted by Dubai for the first time next year.

The challenges, brought to the UAE by Compass International, require students to sign up in groups of two to seven through schools or mentors in order to prepare for the one-day regional competition on March 18.

Four categories

Deepti Lal of Compass said, “There are two components to the DI Challenge - ‘instant’ where students have to respond on the spot the day of the competition, and ‘team’ where the students have months to create a solution to a particular challenge. The teams have four categories of challenges to choose from: science, technical, fine arts, and engineering. They have been designed by reputed partner companies such as NASA and 3M.”

She said the competition is open to students in three categories – elementary (KG to Grade 5), middle (Grade 6 to 8) and secondary (Grade 9 to 12). For ages four to seven, there is a wonderful programme that can be implemented into the curriculum.

Daniel Fenn of Compass said winners of the regional competition will go on to compete in the global round to be held in Tennessee in the US in May 2017.

“The number of children worldwide who participate in DI annually is 150,000. There were 18,000 teams from 7,000 schools that took part last year.”

Each of the challenges encourages students to develop their skills. The technical challenge for instance prompts them to complete tasks by using engineering, research, strategic planning and related skills.

“Points of interest include presenting a show that has an opening act and headlining act. Students have to design and build a stage on which the acts will take place and that will move a team member from one location to another. They have to enhance each act with a technical effect to amaze the audience,” said Lal.

Similarly, the fine arts challenge will have students flexing their acting and creative muscles as they experiment with different types of artistic media and theatre arts, write scripts and design props

source : gulfnews