Ginger Meatballs and Disco Monkey Busters put Bowen’s best foot forward earlier this month.
The Bowen Island Community School teams both placed in their divisions in the provincial Destination Imagination competition in West Vancouver.
The collaborative problem solving competition had 80 teams, around 600 youth, from all over the province.
There are six challenges at elementary, middle and secondary levels of competition. Three are in science, trades, engineering or math and three are in fine arts.
“The wonderful thing about Destination Imagination is that the students have to do everything,” said team leader Samantha Adkins. “They must carefully read the many rules for their challenge and work together to design, create, build, write, paint and build their solutions.
“It is a great opportunity for kids to find out what they can do!”
Youth work for many weeks on their challenges and are to have no adult interference.
The teams have a budget and, once they get to competition, an eight-minute presentation window.
The Ginger Meatballs competed in a technical challenge, On Target, where the teams, comprised of youth between grades three and five, designed aircraft to drop payloads on a target.
The Meatballs’ background story included a trip to the derelict department store Wallymart to fetch supplies for their broken time machine. The team won second place in the technical challenge and first place in the on-the-spot Instant Challenge.
The Disco Monkey Busters competed in a fine arts challenge, Game On. The youth took Monopoly and made Bowopoly, the story of two kids forced to turn to a board game for entertainment after one breaks their phone.
“Other group members acted as the dice and two game pieces while they played the game on a life-size monopoly board,” said Adkins. “Not only did [the kids] design and create costumes and the game board, their board game had to fold up into a box which could move in and out of a classroom.
Their story included many facts about Monopoly and Bowen Island.”
The Monkey Busters won first in both the team challenge and the instant challenge.
Islander Joan Vyner is an affiliate director for Destination Imagination. She said that BICS has always done well at the competition and that it’s always fun to see what the youth come up with.
“We’re very proud of our Bowen kids,” she said.
