It’s almost time to kick off a brand-new season of creativity, collaboration, and pure imagination! Starting August 1, the 2025-26 season of the Destination Imagination Challenge Experience officially launches—and Team Numbers go on sale July 15, so it’s the perfect moment to start planning your school year adventure!
Whether you’re a returning DI team or just discovering our global creativity and innovation program, our upcoming Team Challenges promise to spark excitement, curiosity, and unforgettable growth in students of all ages. Here’s a sneak peek at the 2025-26 Challenge lineup:
🎮 Technical Challenge: Win it Big
The lights, the glamour, the prizes! Your team will create and present your own game show, complete with a host, contestant(s), and dazzling effects that ramp up the tension.
- Create and present a game show.
- Include a host character and at least one contestant.
- Build tension with a raising-the-stakes event.
- Design and create a gimmick, a reveal, and a razzle-dazzle effect for your game show.
- Create and present two Team Choice Elements that show off the team’s interests, skills, areas of strength, and talents.
🧠 Scientific Challenge: Unforgettable
Can your memory be trusted? Dive into the science of human memory and misdirection as your team brings a memory to life and reveals how it leads to a powerful realization.
- Create and present a story about how a character recalling a memory leads to a realization.
- Integrate your team’s research about the science of human memory into the Presentation.
- Create and present a memory depiction. Enhance the memory depiction with a special effect.
- Include a misdirection in your Presentation.
- Create and present two Team Choice Elements that show off the team’s interests, skills, areas of strength, and talents.
⚙️ Engineering Challenge: Above and Beyond
How far can you push the limits—literally? In this challenge, teams will design a structure that holds weight placed far from the center, testing both creativity and engineering smarts. Alongside their build, they’ll tell a dynamic story where something expands, extends, or goes above and beyond, with an exciting visual effect to bring it all to life.
- Test how much weight a team-created structure can hold by placing weights onto the Structure as far from the center as possible.
- Create and present a story in which something important expands, extends, or goes above and beyond.
- Begin the Presentation with an in medias res scene.
- Include an expansion effect.
- Create and present two Team Choice Elements that show off the team’s interests, skills, areas of strength, and talents.
🦸♀️ Fine Arts Challenge: Becoming Super
What happens when two characters make one tough choice but take totally different paths? Create an origin story for both a superhero and a supervillain, and bring their transformation to life with theatrical effects.
- Create and present an origin story that shows how one character becomes a superhero and a different character becomes a supervillain.
- Use theatrical methods to portray a difficult decision, situation, and/or event.
- Use stage makeup on at least one team member.
- Design and create one technical costume.
- Create and present two Team Choice Elements that show off the team’s interests, skills, areas of strength, and talents.
📦 Improvisational Challenge: Casting Shadows
Use shadows and light to tell a powerful, improvised story based on opposing themes, an inciting incident, and a resolution trope—all in a randomly selected setting.
- Create and present an improvisational skit based on an inciting incident.
- Research pairs of opposing themes and incorporate a pair into the skit.
- Include a randomly selected setting.
- Research resolution tropes and incorporate one of them into the skit.
- Use a shadow screen and a box of materials to enhance the skit.
🌎 Service Learning Challenge: Give and Take
Take on a real-world project that meets a community need, then share the story of how two conflicting characters learn to work together, even through misunderstandings and differing viewpoints.
- Identify, design, carry out, and evaluate a project that addresses a need in a real community.
- Create and present a story about at least two conflicting characters who have to work together to address or resolve a dispute.
- Include a misunderstanding and at least two different viewpoints.
- Enhance your Presentation with a dispute depiction.
- Create and present two Team Choice Elements that show off the team’s interests, skills, areas of strength, and talents.
👩🏭 Early Learning Challenge: Helping Hands
Designed for our youngest creators, this Challenge celebrates the helpers who make our world better—and encourages kids to join in!
- Research different kinds of community helpers.
- Create and present a play about community helpers working together to solve a problem.
- Design and create a set that shows where at least one of the community helpers works.
- Create and present a song about helping.
- Create and present one Team Choice Element that shows off the team’s interests, skills, areas of strength, and talents.
Save the Dates!
- Team Numbers go on sale: July 15
- Challenge Season begins: August 1
Whether your team is ready to solve a memory mystery, face off as hero and villain, or lift a structure to new heights, this season will stretch their imagination, build their resilience, and forge lifelong skills.
Start your team, choose your DI Challenge, and get ready to create something extraordinary!
New to Destination Imagination?
If you’re curious about what DI is all about, we offer free monthly webinars where you can get an overview of our STEAM program, explore how it works, and ask any questions you may have.
