Team Pipinpatalopsacopolas

Amelia's Destination Imagination (DI) team competed in the regional DI team challenge on Saturday. This was the big capstone event for several months of teamwork. You may remember that Amelia's DI team chose to compete in the "Project Outreach" category, where the team was to execute a fundraiser that would raise money to meet a community need. After several months of planning and holding group meetings, Amelia and her team held their Make a Wish Fundraiser. The team name, "Team Pipinpatalpsacopolas" was obviously created by the kids, and when asked "why that name?" the kids just giggle and reply that they all thought a long name would be funny.

Today's team challenge had two objectives. The first was for the team to make an eight minute presentation, where the team would present their video (a required component of the project) and then provide a short follow up discussion of what they felt they did best with their project along with suggestions they would make if they were holding the event again. The presentation was held at a local elementary school in front of a panel of trained judges. The team's video is below. The team wrote the script, shot the footage, designed the costumes and edited the video without significant help from the coaches. Amelia appears towards the beginning as the Fairy Princess of the Present (neon green t-shirt).

The second part of the challenge was an "instant challenge", where the group would be presented with a challenge and then given a short time frame to complete it and present their work to a panel of judges. The instant challenge would either be technical in nature or would involve improvisational acting.

Family members were permitted to watch the first presentation, so Scott, John and I went to the school early Saturday morning to watch Amelia and her team. The competition was held in an elementary school classroom, so the setting was intimate. The energy in the school was quite chaotic, as there were dozens of third and fourth grade teams competing at once all over the school and DI teams, coaches, and frantic parents everywhere. The first photo below shows Amelia's team receiving last minute coaching before the presentation, and the second photo was taken during the first minute as the team was setting up their video display.

The kids have to make the 8 minute presentation themselves without any help from their coaches. Once the judges say start the team is on their own. So it was really, really unfortunate (and heartbreaking to watch) that Amelia's team could not get the lighting and sound from the movie projector to work during the 8 minute time frame. The kids could not get the size of the projection to match the screen or the sound to work, thus not permitting the team to play the video effectively for the judges. About halfway through the 8 minutes when they realized things were going terribly wrong many of them looked like they wanted to cry. While some of the team was frantically trying to reconnect cables and plugs into the computer, one of the girls came up with the idea for the team to act out the video on the spot. So the team used their remaining time to try and express verbally what would have been shown on the video, which was a good recovery strategy but was not of the same substance obviously. The kids did their best in the end, though they were all pretty crushed because they couldn't show off their hard work to the judges. All of the parents - and the coaches who had put in hundreds of hours helping the kids plan and create their project - sat helpless in the audience while we watched the kids up front.

The team had a two hour break between the first presentation and the instant challenge. During this time the coaches helped the kids recover from the morning and got them back in the mindset to prepare for the instant challenge. The instant challenge was closed to guests so we couldn't watch, but Amelia's team got an improv challenge and they felt they did well. It was nice to see them come out of the second competition with big smiles on their faces and the satisfaction of having done well.

Overall, Amelia really loved competing with DI. I wrote about it before, but all of these kids are bright and curious about the world, so spending two hours each weekend solving puzzles and having fun with her teammates was a lot of fun for Amelia. She learned a lot during the process and definitely bonded with her team. And on top of it all, the team successfully raised almost $1,000 for the Make A Wish Foundation, which is an amazing accomplishment.