Only team members may contribute ideas and create the Team Challenge and Team Choice Element solutions. Help from non-team members, including Team Managers, is called Interference.
So how can Parents and other family members help out with DI?
Here are a few ideas:
- Be a team manager
- Co-manage a team with another adult
- Find a friend to be a team manager a team
- Be a team manager for instant challenges.
- Be an appraiser (judge) or help find appraisers.
- Help on a round robin basis at meetings and help keep the team members on task.
- Help teach or find resource people to teach special skills i.e.: painting, drawing perspective, sewing, mechanical design, carpentry, how to apply makeup or do hair, etc.
- Come 1/2 hour early to pick up your child from meetings to help clean up, keeping the children on task as their attention span wanes, and be an audience.
- Provide times and places for small groups to meet and work on assigned projects. (painting scenery, building props, practicing skit lines, sewing, etc.)
- Help find places for the team to practice.
- Read and check rules to make sure the team is following even the minor ones.
- Help fill out forms (if allowed).
- Send for clarifications or download new ones from the Destination Imagination web site: Clarifications
- Provide transportation for team members to or from meetings and practices.
- Call the team manager to find out what each team member needs to (or said he/she would) do for the next meeting and pass this information on to the other parents.
- Provide treats for the meetings (nutritious, low sugar)
- Pick up team requested materials.
- Play instant challenge games with your child at home.
- Make up possible home instant challenge problems for the coaches to send home with each child after meetings.
- Call or write school board members, administrators, and the parent council to tell them the good things that are happening in Destination Imagination.
- Encourage and support the teams and team managers.
- Help your child practice brainstorming. Example: what are different ways you can hang a curtain in 15 seconds? Remember you as parents can only ask questions to start your child thinking you cannot give them ideas.
- Help transport props to competition and presentations.
- Be a checklist person for loading for competition.
- Videotape skit practices so members can critique themselves.
- Help supervise skit practices when competition is close i.e.: asking them how the plan to enter, who will carry what, etc.
- Help brainstorm for solutions to “what if _________ happens at competition”.