Challenge Me, Inc. is proud of our 3 teams who will represent Challenge Me, Inc., the town of Andover, and the State of Massachusetts at Global Finals 2019 in Kansas City in May.
Global Finals is the largest annual celebration of creativity in the world and the culminating event for the DI Challenge Experience. Teams from all over the US and more than 15 other countries will attend Global Finals. Attending Global Finals is an unbelievable educational opportunity and a tremendous honor. Students who attend Global Finals will communicate and develop diversity awareness skills with peers from more than 24 cultural backgrounds, develop resilience at a highly competitive level, practice problem solving as they encounter new sets of cultural and societal norms, and establish lifelong connections with students from around the world.
Challenge Me, Inc. is supporting our local teams attending Global Finals by establishing a scholarship fund to help with the costs for the students who will attend. The estimated cost to attend Global Finals is approximately $1,500/person for team registration, housing, food, transportation, and shipping the props the teams have spent months creating. The total cost of sending the Andover Delegation, including parent chaperones and team managers, will be over $49,000. We appreciate each and every donation to our scholarship fund, which will benefit these students.
We are also helping with several fundraisers, a plant sale and Andover DI Spirit Night at Chiptole.
Challenge Me, Inc. is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization, and your donation to our scholarship fund to support our teams going to Globals may be tax-deductible.
Please read more about our teams attending below!
The Fire Breathing Ninja Squirrels, an Elementary Level team made up of five 5th Graders from Andover’s Bancroft Elementary School, tackled this year’s Fine Arts Challenge: Game On! The challenge required the students to choose and research a game, design both a container, which not only held all of the team’s props but also transformed, and a game gizmo, a theatrical representation of one game component. The challenge also included incorporating a technical element into the container or gizmo and writing and performing an 8 minute skit which developed two points of view. This team chose the board game Trouble, and they built a remarkable 2.5 foot by 4 foot wooden box which unfolded flat into an 8’ foot x 8’foot Trouble game board, complete with the game’s iconic Pop-o-matic, acted out by a team member starring as the die sitting in a black box, using a clear umbrella as the pop-o-matic’s dome and Scratch computer programming to announce each popped number rolled. As their game unfolded – so did their story of a hero and a villain and replete with trivia about the Trouble game as well as the a ditty from a 1995 Trouble advertisement.
The Destination Diagnosis team of fifth graders from Bancroft, High Plain, South and West elementary schools took on this year’s Scientific Challenge: Medical Mystery. The challenge required the team to research diseases affecting the human body, create and present an 8 minute story about a medical mystery affecting a human character, including one scene from 2 different perspectives.
The story is about a space crew concerned over a member’s fitness for flight on their upcoming mission. The story entails the methods they utilize to diagnose the character’s mental illness, and then sensitively considers the implications on the mission, that person’s life and career.
The team was tasked with creating a physical representation of a part of the anatomy that was experiencing the medical mystery, and using technical methods had to show the effect of one of the symptoms on the characters anatomy.
Using recycled materials, the team created a realistic representation of a Functional MRI machine. They hand formed three detailed life size brain models from clay, which they illuminated with LED circuits self-designed and assembled in order to show brain activity and structural abnormalities. The brains were hung in a simulated computer display monitor made from a recycled cardboard box, and actuated with magnetic switches, so that effects did not appear to be manually activated.
The Middle Level Team consisting of 3 8th graders and 1 7th grader chose the Technical Challenge, On Target. This challenge required the team to design and build an aircraft that takes off, flies, and lands. In addition, the challenge also required the team to design and create a mechanism for their aircraft to drop a payload in a box while in flight to earn points and perform an 8 minute skit about one or more characters exploring a remote location. This team encountered many technical challenges as they worked on their lofty goal of programming and building their own drone from scratch, and had to make modifications along the way as they came across obstacles. Their Team Choice Elements, required items of the team’s choosing that show off the team’s interests, skills, areas of strength, and talents, were both animatronic creatures, designed, programmed, and built by the team.
