Six College Place students to take on global STEAM competition

Six creative and intelligent students from John Sager Middle School in College Place are gearing up to compete in what their teacher calls “the Super Bowl of creative problem-solving.”

Ted Knauft, a teacher at Sager, has been leading groups of students in the Destination Imagination competition — which takes place all over the globe — since 1998. The competition involves science, technology, engineering, art and math (STEAM) challenges that put students’ creativity and quick-thinking skills to the test.

“There’s a tremendous amount of team building and a tremendous amount of on-the-spot thinking with instant challenges,” Knauft said. “Can you write a script? Can you make it make sense? Is there logic?”

At this year’s global competition in Kansas City, Missouri, which will include middle school students from around the world, teams will participate in a scientific challenge, fine arts challenge, improvisational challenge, service-learning challenge, early learning challenge and instant challenge.

All challenges involve teamwork and creativity. For example, in the scientific challenge, teams must create and present a story in which a character from another planet thinks they’re alone but finds out they are not. The story has to include technobabble and the students must also build something that shows the technobabble visually.

“Thieves of Thebes,” the Sager team that won at the state competition in Tri-Cities, decided to enhance their improvisational skit challenge by adding a technical element.

“We had to make a kinetic art piece, so we chose to make a spinning table and we put some jars on it,” student Mason Howton said. “Before, we had to hide and spin it with our hands, but then we made it, so it spins all by itself with electricity.”

Each team has an overarching theme that they apply to all the challenges. The Thieves of Thebes chose ancient Egypt as theirs, and have built several props, including a sarcophagus, to use during the competition. One student even learned some Arabic to incorporate in the challenges.

“This type of work, for middle school teams, is some high-quality stuff,” Knauft said. “This is all middle school. This is not a parent helping; this is not a teacher doing it.”

While some students are wary of the instant challenge, student Leilah Suarez said it was her favorite part. In an instant challenge, a student is given a random challenge from any category and has only eight minutes to complete it. It could involve building something, performing something or a combination of both.

The team said something they’re all looking forward to is the experience of participating in such a big competition. It’s estimated that 5,000 to 7,000 students will be competing.

“I’m excited to get to know other people,” Suarez said.

Her teammate Carrie Morasch added, “There’s going to be people from all different parts of the world there.”

Some of the competing countries include China, Japan and Turkey.

All of the Thieves of Thebes members are 7th and 8th graders, and most of them have competed before. While this was the team that eventually made it through the state competition, a group of 29 students split up into different teams participated in Destination Imagination this year.

Destination Imagination was once called Odyssey of the Mind, but after a lawsuit about 20 years ago, it split into two different competitions and Destination Imagination was born.

Knauft said College Place students had participated in these competitions for about 25 years because they love the project-based learning.

“Students are applying everything they’ve learned,” Knauft said. “This concept right here (ancient Egypt) is our 6th grade history class. Traditionally across the state, ancient world history is taught in 6th grade, so the students are directly applying what they’ve learned in their classes and putting it toward solving this challenge.”