It’s Friday afternoon, well after the school day has ended and the weekend has begun, and a group of six middle schoolers are gathered at West Mercer Elementary. They’re putting their heads together as they try to figure out ways to create the lightest possible structure while maintaining the possibility to take as much weight off it as possible.

Such is the life of students participating in Destination Imagination (DI), the international, creative problem-solving program, which is technical in nature and ranges through subjects like science, fine arts, improv and structural engineering. Now in its ninth year at Mercer Island schools, 16 teams from grades 4 through 12 are participating in Destination Imagination challenges.

Participating students choose what challenge they want to take on in September and then work on completing that challenge through February. The teams then show their solutions to appraisers, with some teams moving on to the state competition. After that is the global finals in Tennessee, which has seen teams from China and South Korea. Last year, Mercer Island sent teams to the global finals competition.

DI director and coach Mark Headlee said the objective through Destination Imagination is to give the kids a place to practice being creative and expressing that creativity through the opportunity of working in groups.

“These groups are more self-selecting in the sense that they choose the challenge they’re working on,” he said. “They’re looking at things differently, trying to find the most creative and unique solution possible. They’re collaborating, figuring out their strengths and working with everyone’s individual strengths and the team’s strengths. We want these skills to carry over for rest of their life.”

“I ran the program at a school in Iowa for 14 years, and kids were coming back telling me how beneficial it was for them in the workplace,” he said. “They could see the application and were using it daily in their life.”