A primary purpose of DI Tournament is to provide each attending team an opportunity to:


  • show their Team Challenge solution
  • solve an Instant Challenge


Tournament Officials need to create a schedule that indicates when each attending team presents their solutions.

The teams attending are in a competition so they need to be ranked by appraisers that will assign them scores.


Which teams compete against each other?  This is determined by the 

  • Team Challenge each team chooses (eg technical, scientific, fine arts, rising stars,...) and
  • the Level of the team (eg Rising Stars, Elementary, Middle, Secondary, and University).


For example:

  • Elementary level teams that chose the fine arts challenge compete
  • Middle level teams that chose the engineering challenge compete
  • Early Learning (formerly Rising Stars) level teams that all solve the early learning challenge (this is non-competitive so no scores are assigned)


The term used to describe a competing set of teams is a challenge/level.


Each challenge/level has a specific set of appraisers (appraiser team) score the teams in the challenge/level. There will actually be 2 appraiser teams judging each team:

  • the Team Challenge appraiser team that needs to be knowledgeable of the Team Challenge
  • the Instant Challenge appraiser team that needs to be knowledgeable of the Instant Challenge


Why explain all this?  What relevance does it have to the tournament schedule?  The answer is that the schedule needs to ensure:

  • teams are appropriately spaced so they have time between their Team Challenge (TC) and Instant Challenge (IC)
  • teams are spaced so the TC appraiser team can see all their teams in a challenge/level
  • teams are spaced so the IC appraiser team can see all their teams in a challenge/level


Typically the most critical resource are appraisers.  You have a limited number of appraisers and an appraiser team can only see so many team during a day long competition.


Typically appraiser teams are grouped into rooms consisting one or more challenge/levels.  Here is more detail on rooms. Often

  • for Team Challenge a room has one or more challenge/levels for a specific challenge (such as fine-arts-ML and fine-arts-SL)
    This is because the appraisers need to understand the rules of the team challenge in advance of the tournament to appraise it.  The challenge does not change between levels.
  • for Instant Challenge a room has one or more challenge/levels of the same level (such as tech-EL and eng-EL)
    Instant Challenges are typically not revealed to the appraisers until the day of the tournament.  A number of the instant challenges are designed for a specific age group (ie level).  Thus it is more appropriate to combine the same level but different team challenges.


Some times a challenge is very popular and its challenge/level contains too many teams for an appraiser team to score.  In this case we setup multiple appraiser teams each in its own room.  Each is known as a split (more here).