Improve your children’s education while giving them the experience of a lifetime.
As a parent, you strive to ensure your child has every opportunity to grow, learn and succeed. Whether he or she loves to paint and draw, likes to take apart and re-assemble your electronics, is crazy about puzzles, or is a budding young scientist, our academic programs are designed to foster creativity and curiosity through a fun, hands-on learning experience.
Our most popular program is the Team Challenge program, where kids work together in teams to solve one of seven different Challenges: Technical, Scientific, Fine Arts, Improv, Engineering, Service Learning or Early Learning. Students also have the opportunity to showcase their solution to the Challenge at a local tournament.
Skills that last a lifetime
Through solving a DI Challenge, kids learn invaluable life skills as they navigate the creative process—a powerful learning tool that teaches them how to think, not what to think. Here are a few examples of the concepts and skills students learn through participating in DI:
- Early learners are naturally curious and can adapt well to learn new STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) concepts.
- Kids can express their creativity, learn simple building and construction, become comfortable working in teams, and learn how to speak in front of an audience.
- Students learn to focus, take risks, reflect on what they’ve learned, and grow from failure.
- Participants improve in collaboration, problem solving, and creative and critical thinking
- Students have fun and build friendships that can last a lifetime.
Tips for parents
- Understand the Rules of Interference. DI Challenges are all about allowing kids to create on their own without help from any adults or non-team members.
- Share your skills! Learning new skills is a big part of the DI process and can help teams in solving a Challenge. From acting to engineering to learning how to use a power drill, parents are encouraged to share their skills and talents with their team. You can also help coordinate field trips or outside skills workshop.
- Host the team or at your house. DI teams need a space to have their team meetings and work on their solution.
- Provide snacks. Between idea generation and building a solution, kids often get hungry at team meetings. Provide them with healthy snacks or purchase them for the Team Manager so that he or she can provide them at upcoming team meetings.
- Become a Tournament Appraiser or other volunteer. DI is a volunteer-run organization. Without our amazing volunteers, we wouldn’t be able to develop Challenges or host tournaments. Even giving back for one day helps!
- Help out as a Co-Team Manager. One of the biggest gifts you can give is to become a co-Team Manager. By having more than one Team Manager, you can split up some of the work and alleviate some of the pressure. For example, one of you can oversee the Team Challenge while the other oversees Instant Challenge.