Londonderry Middle School’s Destination Imagination (D.I.) team earned top honors at the New Hampshire State Tournament last weekend, and will advance to the Global Finals for the fourth time.
The team, which has been competing together since fourth grade, finished in first place for their solution to this year’s technical challenge, “Creature Feature.”
The technical challenge looks for technical design and innovation and requires the team to create a creature that has three “creature features,” and to exhibit those features. The team could define the type of feature they wanted to display technically, according to Bill Melanson, who has been serving as a D.I. coach for about 17 years.
Melanson said he enjoyed coaching his children’s D.I. teams so much that he went back to volunteer as a coach at Matthew Thornton Elementary School after his own children graduated from high school.
According to the seasoned coach, his team’s experience working together and mix of strengths are what have made them so successful.
Team member Sierra Sessa agreed, saying she considers her teammates to be her closest friends; and that after working together for a few years, they “understand each other, and understand their strengths and weaknesses.”
Other team members are Neil Baran, Jillian Fitzgibbons, Jimmy Fitzgibbons, Ian Godspeed, Patrick Hagearty, and Lauren Mullen. All members of the team are in eighth grade.
“They have great team-work,” Melanson said. “We have kids who like to do the technical parts, and there are very artistic parts as well. Some of the kids really like the artistic part, while some kids like to write the script. We have a good balance of skills that work together very well.”
Sessa said her team has chosen the technical challenge almost every year they have competed, and that the group particularly enjoyed this year’s challenge because it was more technical than in previous years.
For the Creature Feature challenge, the team built a rat that operates like a hovercraft. The group had to make the rat an integral character in a prepared skit, which they accomplished by making the rat talk.
The team’s skit, set in mythological times, tells a story about the goddess Demeter putting a famine on a community because she wasn’t being adequately worshipped. The rat saves the day.
To make the rat move across the stage, the team used a pump from a blow-up air mattress as part of the lifting system, and integrated propeller and model airplane elements found at craft stores for propulsion to move the rat across the floor.
“We all had our fingers crossed when they turned the rat on to move across the stage,” said Melanson, who will meet with the students weekly leading up to the Global Finals, held April 20-23 in Knoxville, Tenn., to give them a chance to work out any issues with their hovercraft and make their presentation more robust.
Melanson said the students will improve upon their artistic elements, such as a papier-mâché head for Demeter’s character, which features yarn for the hair and various organic elements to decorate the face; as well as the jokes and puns in their skit, polishing it up for competition.
But Global Finals isn’t about winning, it’s about the team feeling as if they have done their best and feeling good about their solution to the challenge, according to Melanson.
“It’s my favorite week of the year. I get to be in this room with 8,000 of the most creative kids from around the world,” he said. “Just to have made it to Globals, they have already won.”
“You literally feel like you’re on top of the world. Here you are at the biggest competition and you’re talking to people from completely different parts of the world,” said Sessa, who made friends with a girl from China at the Global competition, communicating through her translator. “The coolest part is being able to experience this D.I. competition on a whole new level with people you’d never get a chance to speak with unless you made it to this competition.”