I wrote these Instant Challenges to help Elementary Team Managers, although most Team Managers will find them helpful. When training a Destination Imagination team, practicing Instant Challenges is absolutely necessary. Especially with Elementary Level teams, it is essential that they are familiar with what kinds of challenges they may be asked to solve. In my experience, Elementary Level teams require intense training to become proficient at the Instant Challenge. Thus, in many cases, proficiency is not attained because many Team Managers either underestimate the importance of the Instant Challenge, overestimate the abilities of their team, or simply don’t understand how best to train them. For the purposes of this book, I will assume that my audience has a basic knowledge of the Instant Challenge and what Destination Imagination says about training a team for the Instant Challenge.

I created my Instant Challenges to look as much like real Instant Challenges from Destination Imagination as possible. When teams practice Instant Challenges, it is important that what they are experiencing is as close to what will happen at the tournament as possible. While it is essential that the team develop the skills necessary to solve Instant Challenges, it helps their scores (or at least their confidence) if they aren’t surprised by the format of the challenge. This includes not only the types of materials they may have to work with or the kinds of things for which they will typically be awarded points, but also details such as the font, organization, and length of the challenge.

In the spirit of that concept, I have studied about 200 Instant Challenges released by Destination Imagination and I tried to make my challenges as much like those as possible. However, the challenges released by Destination Imagination have changed formats over time; even two challenges in the same book may be structured differently. As Instant Challenges continue to evolve, my practice versions may become slightly outdated as far as the format is concerned.

My intent is not to replace the need to use Instant Challenges released by Destination Imagination. Nor is it to eliminate skill-building exercises that are not in the format of Instant Challenges. It is to give the Team Manager a library of Instant Challenges from which to choose for practices. My challenges are designed for use as a team is developing skills and experimenting with techniques. Once the team has fine-tuned their abilities, they should practice with official Instant Challenges. As a minimum, the team should practice the ten or so challenges released with the Program Materials annually.

The challenges released each year are all categorized as Entry and Advanced Levels, and as far as I can tell, these are the challenges that were used at the regional and affiliate tournaments the year before. This is valuable information because it lends insight as to what types of challenges will be given to teams. This means that (at the regional and affiliate tournaments) any team has the possibility of getting a task-based challenge, a performance-based challenge, or a hybrid challenge.

It also means Elementary teams may be getting a challenge slightly above their skill level and High School teams may be getting a challenge slightly below their skill level. Of course, it doesn’t matter how hard a challenge is because all teams competing against each other are given the same challenge, but it does give the Team Manager a good idea of what will be expected of the team.

This is not to imply that only a High School team could successfully do an Advanced Level Challenge. In fact, I believe that an Elementary team could potentially be trained to do Advanced Level Instant Challenges, if they spent enough time practicing. However, this extra time is not often available to Elementary Level teams that meet once a week.

There is a big difference between practicing Instant Challenges and training for the Instant Challenge. The average Elementary Team should see the Instant Challenge as something they should prepare for and do their best on, but they should not spend large amounts of time training for it because they also have a 300 point Central Challenge for which to prepare. One Instant Challenge per meeting is ideal for the team that wants to be moderately competitive, but not obsessively prepared.

Competitive teams who want to maximize their instant Challenge scores should spend 1 hour a week practicing Instant Challenges. These teams should focus on training the types of instant challenges that on which they routinely perform most weakly. More often than not, this type of challenge will be Task-Based. Most challenges that are exclusively Entry Level are Performance-based and most challenges that are exclusively Advanced Level are Task-Based. Since most teams need to train for a Task-Based Instant Challenge, and most of the Task-Based Challenges released by Destination Imagination call for some elaborate apparatus that would only appear at the Global Finals Tournament, I wrote many of these Instant Challenges with such teams in mind. It is my hope that these challenges help those teams that need more task-based challenges such as those that might appear at a regional or affiliate level tournament.

It is important that I note that these Instant Challenges are meant only to mimic those released by Destination Imagination. These are not official Destination Imagination Instant Challenges. Also, the inspiration for these challenges came from a variety of sources, including www.spiritofchicago.org, a web site with hundreds of exercises meant to build the skills necessary to solve Instant Challenges.