Students for a Creative Iowa

Whether your Destination Imagination team begins meeting as early as September or as late as January, as a Team Manager you need to know how what resources are available to you, and which ones are most important. This post discusses all of the must-use resources that are critical to your team’s success, as well as supplementary resources that can make your life easier and your team’s meetings more fun and meaningful. This is one post you’ll want to bookmark for future reference.

Essential Resources

If you have never managed a DI team before, your best friend is the Roadmap section (pages 109-218) of the program materials that are shipped to you. The program materials may also be downloaded from the Resource Area of Destination Imagination, found HERE. The Roadmap, in fact, should be an experienced Team Manager’s best friend as well. The Roadmap is a meeting-by-meeting activity guide that takes you from the first meeting of the season all the way through tournament and beyond to your team’s celebration.

Your primary role as Team Manager is to facilitate your team’s journey through the creative process, a role in which you may or not have previous experience. Competition can be a part of that creative process, but it is only one of the stops along the way. The Roadmap is filled with team-building activities and practice Instant Challenges, as well as activities that teach you how to ask open-ended questions and for your team to learn how to work through effective brainstorming and decision-making sessions. While they do so, they are making progress in solving their Team Challenge.

Are Team Managers required to use the Roadmap? No, but it is highly recommended that they do so. If you take a look at the last page of every competitive Team Challenge, you’ll notice that there is a new page that is part of the Tournament Data Form that teams are required to complete and bring to tournament. This page asks students to reflect on and describe their creative journey, which is subdivided into six process stages. By using the Roadmap, you are more likely to provide your team with learning experiences that touch on all aspects of the creative process. You will provide your team with experiences that they will be able to describe on the last page of their Tournament Data Form. The six process stages they will need to discuss include the following:

• Recognize, or understanding all the issues or points of the Challenge
• Imagine, or using your imagination to explore new ideas about possible solutions to the Challenge
• Initiate, or taking risks and going beyond the minimum as you commit to a solution
• Collaborate, or understanding and using different problem-solving styles, and listening to all team ideas before judging them
• Assess, or assessing the solution as it is being created and after it is finished
• Evaluate, or reflecting on the experience, thinking about what was learned, and celebrating the team’s journey and accomplishments

Please note that while the last page of the Tournament Data Form is not actually scored by the Appraisers, it is used by the Affiliate Director as one method of evaluating a team’s readiness for advancing to Destination Imagination Global Finals, especially in instances where fewer than 3 teams in the same Challenge and Level are competing. Please refer to the last paragraph of Iowa’s Tournament Policies page for a more complete explanation. Note that Iowa’s Tournament Policies also contain some site restrictions that supersede other rules found in Rules of the Road or the Team Challenges.

There are two other parts of your program materials that are essential resources for both you and your team. The first consists of the Team Challenges (pages 23-107) and the second is Rules of the Road (pages 219-264). The Team Challenges provide the basic rules of every Team Challenge.  Rules of the Road are general rules that all Dl participants follow. They are superseded by Team Challenges.

It is important for you to know that Team Challenges are superseded only by Published Clarifications, which are located at the Destination Imagination Web site. At present, every Team Challenge has had Published Clarifications released. If teams have questions that they are unable to answer for themselves after reading the Team Challenges, they may submit up to 10 Team Clarification questions, which will be answered privately by the International Challenge Masters. The deadline for submitting Team Clarification questions is February 15, 2014.

While Destination Imagination creates the Program Materials your team uses for its Team Challenge, the Iowa Affiliate administrates the program. If your team plans to participate at a tournament, you will need to familiarize yourself with logistical information found on this Web site beneath the Current Season tab, located beneath the navigation bar below our banner. This logistical information includes such topics as Iowa membership registration, Team Manager & Coordinator training opportunities, competition dates and results, tournament policies, the Iowa calendar, contests, and scholarship opportunities.

Below is a summary of the essential resources you need in order for your team to participate in Destination Imagination.

 Supplementary Resources

The Roadmap suggests that every team meeting be divided into 5 parts, and provides activities that correspond with this agenda:

• Ice breaker or warm-up activity
• Instant Challenge practice and debriefing
• Team building/discussion
• Team Challenge development
• Reflection time

The above agenda is only one way of facilitating a team meeting. You know your team best, and will likely modify the agenda according to your team’s needs. That’s where supplementary resources are helpful. If your team needs more team-building activities, more improvisation or acting techniques practice, or more practice with Instant Challenges, you’ll find what you need among the supplementary resources listed in the table below.

Please contact us if you are having difficulty locating information, or if you’d like to suggest a resource not included in this post. Thanks!

Judy Nolan
Co-Affiliate Training Director
E-mail: cre8iowa@gmail.org or judynolan@aol.com