With a table full of snacks and matching light-up cowboy hats, Oxford’s area secondary level Destination Imagination (DI) team – the Drastic Park Rangers – knows how to make a learning experience fun.
For most of the last decade, the team has practiced two nights a week in the “magical barn,” located behind coach Bill Greene’s house in Oxford. Greene, 74, an artist and builder of large displays, has been coaching and judging DI for nearly 35 years.
The evenings are full of laughs, teaching moments and, sometimes, song and dance.
“It’s been fun just to see these kids grow and change from kindergarten,” said Beth Fryer, 44, one of the team’s two coaches – since kindergarten – and a world cultures teacher at Talawanda Middle School.
Talawanda High School juniors Kai Ironstrack, Thea Holley, Ysabella (Izzy) Anders, Addison Greene and sophomore Bryce Wortman took home 1st place with their scientific challenge at the recent DI Ohio state competition. The team won the central challenge portion by nearly 30 points.
The team also won a DaVinci Award, the highest award in DI, which is granted to individuals and teams who demonstrate the spirit of adventurous risk-taking.
The team will compete in-person the week of May 20 at the global finals in Kansas City, Missouri, against more than 40 teams.
Each season, DI teams chose to take on one of six central challenge areas: scientific, technical, fine arts, service learning, engineering or improvisation. At each competition, they also compete in an instant challenge that is not revealed to any team prior to the competition, and it must remain a secret even after competition, the team said.
While the team was unable to share the details of what their instant challenge pertained to, the team is required to think on their feet by applying appropriate skills to produce a solution to a problem in a short period of time.
The central challenge makes up 75% of their total score, including points from two team choice elements. Greene said these elements can be any sort of talent including song, dance, a mathematical equation, artistic ability or computer programming.
Throughout the season, Fryer and Greene work to make sure they stay on track and just get things done. Fryer works with the team on scripting and scheduling. Greene shows the team how to use different hand tools, and makes sure that the furnace and air conditioning keeps with practices in the barn.
This year, the scientific challenge required teams to select a period of dating and prove or disprove a scientific belief from that time, except on another planet.
The scientific challenge hones in on showing off science fiction skills by portraying how a specific phenomenon could have happened. The performance requires a full script and props, all of which must follow anywhere from 10 to 18 pages of guidelines, Greene said.
The team began drafting their scientific challenge project this past November. The team decided to tackle proving that dinosaurs lived at the same time as humans.
“They like a challenge,” coach Greene said with a chuckle.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, dinosaurs died out approximately 65 million years before humans appeared on Earth.
When choosing a topic, the team, well, most of it, agreed that it’s democratic. The team historically has chosen the scientific or fine arts category.
“We vote, and that’s about where it ends,” Addison said. Fryer said they started doing it that way in kindergarten.
“And then they argue after the vote,” Greene said, following up, receiving a laugh from around the table.
The team chose elements that centered on artistic and mechanical abilities that would support their scripted skit: a dinosaur sculpture and a hand-painted wooden backdrop.
By February, they began building their backdrop, puppet sculpture and the connecting mechanisms to engineer the two together.
The team has divided up when it comes to preparation, according to Bryce. He has been working on the dinosaur prop, Thea and Kai have been working on the mechanics of their prop to function as a puppet, and Addison and Izzy have been working on the backdrop.
The team has carried this scientific challenge project throughout the season, from competition to competition.
“We see what scored the lowest and just improve on that before the next competition,” Bryce said.
Two hours before they went on for their central challenge performance at state, the crank mechanism that connected the dinosaur puppet to the backdrop stopped pushing forward and the handle broke off. In a moment of improvisation, they used Addison’s Aquaphor lip balm as an oil to get it moving again.
They’re working on ensuring the crank is glued properly and runs smoothly for globals, Kai said.
Addison said their work on challenges may have inspired a desire to study physics, but it was the friendships that have been most important.
“You’re building these relationships that you wouldn’t build with regular friends because we are hanging out with each other two, three times a week for months on end,” Addison said.
Bryce finds the skit portion of the challenges to be right up his alley.
“I love performing and this has helped me kind of grow my ability to just have fun when I’m performing for people,” Bryce said, adding that he hopes to major in musical theater at Miami University.
Kai said getting the ability to work with people, while using patience and taking initiative will be the most helpful when thinking about college.
Thea enjoys the script writing aspect of DI and will apply that in writing her future fantasy books.
“I like writing, and I want to be an author one day and major in creative writing,” Thea said, while the team agreed fantasy was the best genre.
Izzy said she will apply the process of research they do every season when drafting their project into her hopes of pursuing a career in the medical field. She also said the group is “lovely.”
As DI inspires the team in their future plans, Coach Greene said he still doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up.
