Salem Academy STEAM Team Earns Trip To Kansas City For Globals

SALEM, MA — A group of talented Salem Academy Charter School students are taking their skills on the road to Kansas City as part of the state-champion Destination Imagination team.

The students recently won the state championship in the STEAM competition with its project "Piece by Piece" taking the top spot in the Technical Challenge. The challenge required the students to design a presentation that incorporated a team-created puzzle and use technical design to create a puzzle solver that pieced the puzzle together during their presentation and highlighted a pivotal moment in the story.

"Some members of this team have been doing DI since kindergarten and one member just joined this year," Team Manager Liz Beaver said. "This is the perfect opportunity for all of them to demonstrate their ingenuity and creativity in front of a larger audience and compete against the other winning teams from all over the world.

"I love to see these teenagers excited about using their talents and creativity to think outside of the box and compete against other teams with completely different ideas and skills."

During Globals, students will compete against teams from all over the world, and will also get to watch other performances and will have opportunities to pin trade and engage with other teams in activities meant to challenge their thinking.

"DI has given me the opportunity to grow as a leader as well as a team member," Salem Academy junior Skylar Winter said. "It involves a lot of cooperation and it has allowed me to grow as a person as well as develop my skills. Doing DI has challenged my artistic skills such as sewing, painting, and designing, as well as my problem-solving.

"Overall, DI is amazing, and I wouldn't be who I am today without it."

The trip to Kansas City for Globals is in May.

"This was my first time doing DI and I had a lot of fun problem solving and using creative ideas to make a contraption used to solve a puzzle," junior Marshall Lobsitz said. "We had a lot of fun acting to perform the story that went along with it. Before I was on the team I heard my friends talking about DI and that made me very interested in doing it. I got the chance to join the team this year and I am so excited we get to go to Globals, that is not a chance people get very often."

"I have cultivated my creativity through my participation in DI over the last 7 years," junior Lucca Papanastasiou added. "At Globals we will get to perform in front of the top judges and see other teams that placed first in their divisions.

"I am excited to go, we got this."

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)