Deerfield School Finishes High At STEAM Competition In Kansas City

DEERFIELD, IL — It's "Full S.T.E.A.M. Ahead" for a group of local fourth-graders following a third-place finish at the Destination Imagination Global Finals last weekend in Kansas City.

Destination Imagination, or D.I., is an extracurricular/school program that allows young people of all ages to be involved in creative problem-solving in the STEAM field, fine arts, and service learning with minimal adult intervention.

The students — Teddy Calderon, Brayden Ennessy, Lola Hoch, Shanah Lawrence, Lior Rubinstein, William Sheehan, Anthi Tsilimigras — won first place in the state at DeKalb, prior to the most recent competition. The team is managed by Julie Calderon, Lisa Ennessy and Jessica Sheehan.

For D.I., teams need to:

1. Plan and carry out a project that addresses a team-identified community need.
2. Identify at least one goal for the project and put a good faith effort at pulling it though to reach the goal.
3. The team creates a communication plan, identifies stakeholders, creates a project forecast, and enlists community partners.

In addition, the Walden team implemented composting at the school by creating a science fiction skit with many required components. The judging at state and globals was based on the integration of the project into the skit and the inclusion of the many components.

Walden had other teams also compete in Kansas City, which included students from as far as South Korea, Brazil and Pakistan.

Cindy Hoch, a parent at Walden, told Patch that "Full S.T.E.A.M. Ahead" worked with Walden school administrators, staff and Lake Shore Recycling to provide composting bins at the school to bring attention at the elementary level of what composting is and why it’s a good thing.

"Of course, all this wouldn’t be possible without the students who composted their daily leftover lunches," Hoch said. "The composting program is still in its infancy stage in Deerfield, so the hope is that by educating younger community members about composting that other schools and more households will also start doing it."

She added that LSR has provided all households with a composting bin.

"We could not be more proud of what this team has accomplished," Hoch said.