Laguna Beach students take their imagination to next destination — educational program’s state competition

For the nine Laguna Beach teams heading to the Destination Imagination state competition in Clovis on Saturday, the sky’s the limit on where their imaginations can take them.

Destination Imagination is a global educational program that encourages young people to be “the next generation of innovators, leaders and creative problem solvers.” The organization annually asks students from kindergarten to universities to engage in one of seven challenges issued by the program.

The intention, said Robbin Guy, regional director for the Orange County chapter, is to “take learning to the next level while kids have fun with their friends.”

“[Destination Imagination] is one of the only places where kids have total control and the freedom to use their imaginations to think outside of the box to solve challenges,” Guy said in an email. “The skills they learn will give them an advantage as they encounter challenges in their real lives and careers.”

For tournaments, teams complete projects beforehand and present them there. There’s an additional instant challenge at the competition.

The nine Laguna teams participated principally in the technical challenge, which asked teams to design and build an aircraft capable of picking up and dropping off a team-created payload.

Other challenges they tackled were the improvisational challenge, in which students researched historical figures on coins to prepare a skit that is part comedy, part tragedy and part nonverbal; the engineering challenge, which asked students to build a load-bearing structure; and the science challenge, in which teams researched the human body and medical conditions that can affect it.

Competitors also must be prepared to incorporate a story into each project.

In the technical challenge, for example, participants, in addition to fashioning the aircraft, must create a story about two characters exploring a remote location. In the scientific challenge, entrants need to present a medical mystery surrounding a patient. Participants are rewarded for their creativity.

Each team has a manager, but parents and other adults involved are not allowed to help with the actual project.

“The whole point with all of this is to develop solutions that are out-of-the-box creative, not necessarily things that’ll get the job done but things that are extraordinarily creative,” said Tanya Hovanesian, a parent and manager for her children’s two teams.

Hovanesian’s children, Ani, 13, and Joseph, 16, have been participating in Destination Imagination competitions for years.

The family recently made news when Ani became a founding member of an all-girls Boy Scout troop in Laguna Beach.

Ani, who attends Thurston Middle School, said she was inspired to try the competition after watching Joseph participate in the team Brilliant Boom Bam Bananas and decided “that’s what I want to do.”

She formed her own team, Catnip, with her friends when she was old enough to compete at the sixth- to eighth-grade level. This is Team Catnip’s third year competing.

“Nothing’s the same, so you can’t prepare for next year, which is really smart. My team and I have grown up in [Destination Imagination] and in this area,” Ani said. “As we’ve grown up, the challenges get harder every year, which leads us to become more of a family together.”

May Chapman, a member of Team Catnip, said the best part about the competition is that she gets to be “completely ridiculous” with her friends.

Joseph, who has been competing in Destination Imagination since junior high school, said it has become more difficult to participate in events as he and his friends get older, partly because high school keeps them busy.

But, he added, “it’s almost like you make time to do it. You get to do it with your friends and it doesn’t become too much of a consumption of time.”

Keira Hundhausen, a seventh-grader at Thurston, has done everything from electronics to woodworking for Destination Imagination.

This year, she was responsible for coding a “Raspberry Pi” — a small single-board computer made for children to practice and learn fundamental programming — to control the pump of a large model of a brain and other props during the scientific challenge.

“What’s most rewarding is the final product,” Keira said. “You turn around and you see what you’ve done and what you’ve learned. We’ve done a lot of the manual labor. I just kind of want to show it off now.”

Her friend and teammate Hannah Kaiser said she wasn’t sure what to think of the Destination Imagination competition at first, but she became fascinated with technology and said she’s thankful for the opportunity to compete alongside Keira.

Teams that move on from the state competition this weekend will go to the world competition in May in Kansas City, Mo.

“We’re pretty confident we’re going to get somewhere on the leaderboard,” Hannah said. “I feel kind of nervous, but I’m excited to see how far we’ll go, because my other teams didn’t make it as far. Now I have teammates who want to go as far as I do, and I’m really glad to be on this team so we can try to meet that goal.”