IMAGINE THAT!

For the second year in a row, the Shawano School District will send two squads to Destination Imagination’s Global Finals in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Destination Imagination’s goal is to teach students creative processes, including imagination and innovation, and how to apply those skills toward challenges in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and the arts.

Teams from Olga Brener Intermediate School, The Seven Wonders of Brener, and Shawano Community Middle School, Peace of the PI(E) Squared, qualified for the finals, which will be held from May 20-23 at the University of Tennessee, after placing second in their age brackets at the state competition April 18 in Stevens Point.

The Seven Wonders squad is the first from a Shawano elementary school to qualify for the finals in 19 years, when the competition was known as Odyssey of the Mind.

Hillcrest Primary School teacher Jane Krueger coaches the Olga Brener team, which includes fifth-graders Jackson Smits and Liam Krueger, and third-graders Josie Seay, Ava Bendtschneider, Lucas Reed and Owen Krueger.

Krueger said the team worked hard to finish second at state in the Creature Feature category.

“I think that is pretty amazing,” she said. “I was really proud of them.”

In the competition, the students build a creature capable of performing specific actions and present an adventure story about the creature. They utilize scientific principles of chemistry, electricity and physics in the process.

Craig Ferch, district psychologist and DI coordinator, coaches the SCMS team, which includes eighth-grader Raquel Riemer and seventh-graders Amy Quinn, Bailey Harkey, Kaitlynn Dobratz, Autumn VanDerLinden, Michaela Aschenbrenner and McKenah Fickel.

Peace of the PI(E) Squared will compete in the Brand Aid category, which requires students to identify, strategize, design and implement a project that address a community need. Students can use multimedia to convey their message.

Ferch and Krueger said one of the biggest hurdles in DI is getting the youngsters to work together.

“Destination Imagination is teamwork, it is sharing ideas, it is about listening to someone else’s ideas and not dismissing it,” Ferch said. “Instead, it is about taking any idea and making it work.”

“We talked about the idea of compromise,” Krueger said. “That is a new concept for little kids. How we can we respectively work together and get along?”

This year’s Global Finals, billed as the world’s largest celebration of creativity, will include 1,400 teams and more than 17,000 students and volunteers.

“It is a huge event, and when you see the pictures, it is like being at the Super Bowl,” Krueger said. “There are people from Honduras, there are people from Japan and Canadian provinces, too.”

Two teams became the first Shawano squads to advance to the Global Finals last year in 17 years, when it was previously called Odyssey of the Mind. The DIvergent Thinkers tied for 20th place among 72 schools in one category, and The Above and Beyond team was 36th of 38 schools in another challenge.