After three years of qualifying for globals, gifted teacher Angela Hoefer decided to go full send and take her gifted classes. The Marshfield Junior High seventh and eighth grade students have been a part of the Odyssey of the Mind and Destination Imagination competitions for years and won first and second place each time, qualifying them to advance to globals. It costs each group $5,500 to register, bringing them to a total of $11,000 that they need to pay. To raise enough money for the fees, Hoefer has gotten the kids into many fundraisers and ways to get more money such as selling World’s Finest Chocolate, selling Caesars Pizza, helping out at concessions, selling raffle tickets, hosting a garage sale and a book sale, getting involved with the Snap! Raise fundraiser, getting sponsors from various surrounding companies, mailed out donation letters and helping out at the Cherry Blossom Festival. With the funds that were raised, they have gotten close to their total goal.

Destination Imagination is a STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) organization for people of all ages ranging from preschool through university. Their mission is to inspire youth to imagine and innovate new creative ideas that will prepare them for what might come in their futures. They encourage them to learn from their mistakes and celebrate their successes as a team. In the past, Hoefer has gone through a separate part of the company, Odyssey of the Mind, which has the same concept, but instead, it’s held in a different location. Hoefer decided to switch this year because the globals were held around here, whereas Odyssey of the Mind is held further away, which she wasn’t very comfortable with. 

For the competition, the seventh grade gifted class chose an engineering topic called “Thrill Ride” where they were tasked with creating a roller coaster track to launch and support a golf ball. Furthermore, they had to create a slideshow that would demonstrate how it would feel to ride the roller coaster. They placed first in their division.

“The one thing I would change is that I wish we would have started preparing earlier,” Archer Hoefer, seventh grader, says. “Overall, I am happy with how it turned out.”

The eighth graders chose to do a fine arts challenge called “Flip the Script” where they chose any well-known story or fairy tale and flipped it while still keeping one original scene. The story they decided to do was “Rumpelstiltskin.” In the past few years, due to COVID, the gifted classes had to do their performance over a video call, so to do it in person was a bit different than how this group did it last year. This performance got them second in their division. 

“I’m not sure that we will ever do something like this again, just because of the cost. If I could, I would bring every team that qualified to globals. So far we have had so much fun and grown closer like a family and I just really want this to be a memory that these kids can hold onto,” Hoefer said.