Meet the 2010 Illinois DI Scholarship Awardee, Adriana Garties!

Adriana Garties is a senior at Northside College Prep High School in Chicago.  She will be graduating in June and plans to major in engineering.  Adriana and her family have lived in four states and she has participated in Destination Imagination in three of them.  She was on DI teams in 4th and 5th grades in Valencia, CA and 6th through 8th grades in Littleton, CO.  After moving to Chicago she continues to participate in DI, competing in DI Extreme and volunteering at Regional and Affiliate tournaments, workshops, and Science in the City events.

To solve the Scholarship Challenge, Adriana created a computer version of Improv Bingo that DI participants could download from any DI website and use to sharpen their improvisational and creative skills.
In Adriana's words:
Improvisation can be intimidating at first, but the best way to improve is through constant practice.  Teammates become more comfortable with each other, learn their strengths and weaknesses, and have fun imagining new stories.
I used free software called Alice to build my computer game.
–Alice was developed by a team at Carnegie Mellon University that included Randy Pausch, writer of The Last Lecture.
–The software is often called “a free gift from Carnegie Mellon,” because the developers made it to share with students and educators around the world.  Anyone with an Internet connection can download Alice for free.
–For more information, or to download Alice, go to www.alice.org.