Anne Hutch & Greenvale Students Participate in 'Destination Imagination' Competition

Education isn’t just about helping students retain facts, it’s about empowering youngsters with the tools they will need to become lifelong learners. 

Over the last few months, a group of students at Anne Hutchinson and Greenvale have been exploring the intersection of creativity, innovation and critical thinking as part of the Destination Imagination program. On Saturday, those hardy learners traveled up to Somers High School to participate in the District Imagination Eastern Regional Tournament and square off against other area schools in an event that tested the group’s problem-solving and communications skills, allowing them to chart their own paths towards their final goals. 

Destination Imagination provides students of all ages a chance to develop the life skills—including critical and creative thinking, public speaking, and collaborative problem solving—that are so important to academic and career success in a competitive setting. The organization runs roughly 200 regional competitions each year, although Saturday’s event in Somers marked the inaugural appearance for Eastchester schools. 

Brian Powers—a third grade teacher who served as the team manager for the Greenvale group—said that discussions about participating in the Destination Imagination program were born from a desire to provide more ambitious extracurricular academic opportunities for students so inclined to seek out a challenge. 

“There was a big push in the community for enrichment programs in Eastchester, and since [Assistant Superintendent for Instruction, Assessment and Student Success] Bill Meyer previously had experience with this group, this seemed like a fit,” said Power. “So we participated in an information session with Dr. Meyer and Destination Imagination’s regional director, we gauged community interest, and we began to put teams together. 

The district fielded two teams of students—Powers led a group from Greenvale that competed in the Tech: Win It Big event while Elizabeth Constan served as the team manager for the Anne Hutchinson squad, which competed in Art: Becoming Super. The Greenvale students were tasked with creating their own ‘game-show’—complete with theme music and a plinko-style machine, while Constan’s group was asked to work collaboratively to write—and then perform—a super-hero themed script that met specific requirements, as outlined in the event rules.

Both Powers and Constan noted that while they were involved in a supervisory role, the real heavy-lifting was done by the students themselves, something that enabled them to accomplish an open-ended task through creativity and collaboration with their teammates.  

“Most of elementary education, at least until fourth or fifth grade, is very teacher-led,” said Powers. “But for Destination Imagination, we are really serving more as facilitators; In the beginning, I spoke a little more about the process and gave them a few ideas on how to attack problems, but after that, I was essentially hands-off.”

“The independence component is something I really loved about this,” added Constan. “The students had so much agency over their project; I reminded them about the elements they needed, I taught them how to sew their costumes, but they were the ones that had to actually do it.

“When the kids are working in groups, synthesizing ideas from all these different fields, it’s not just one kid doing the work,” she added. “When you work collaboratively, you have to identify each team member’s strengths, and that’s one of the things I found most valuable about this experience.”

Powers and Constan say that this initial excursion into the world of Destination Imagination was a success, and they both hope to expand the program to allow for more participation in coming years. 

“The kids have loved it, and I even heard some of my second graders talking about how they wanted to do this next year,” said Constan. 

“The feedback was really overwhelming,” added Powers. “The kids got a chance to work with other students they might not normally spend time with, and just about every single one of our kids said that they would definitely do this again.”

Dr. Meyer said that this is only the beginning of Eastchester's participation in Destination Imagination and that the district plans to make the program available to even more students next year.

"We are excited to build on this successful first year," said Meyer. "We plan to introduce more teams and expand this work into our classrooms moving forward."