The Dartmouth Middle School’s Destination ImagiNation team will advance to a state competition on April 1 after taking first place in a regional tournament.

The middle school’s “The Improv 4” team was tasked with creating improvisational skits from a story prompt given at the March 11 DI Regional Tournament, held at Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School. Students Ryan Arruda, Connor Bok, Ryan Duggan, and Madyn Waskiewicz took first place, and will head to the Massachusetts DI State Tournament at Worcester Polytechnic Institute next month.

The Improv 4 will compete against seven other first place middle school teams at the state competition. From there, two teams will advance to the global tournament.

"The state tournament has higher standards and higher expectations of the kids. They want to be sure they're sending the best of the best to represent Massachusetts at the globals," said Casey DeMello, who coordinates Dartmouth's DI teams.

Destination ImagiNation is an international nonprofit for kindergarten through college students. It promotes creativity, critical thinking, teamwork, problem solving skills, and time and resource management. Each team is provided with a multifaceted challenge that it must work on for several months, and then presents its solution at the tournaments.

Dartmouth sent two teams to the regional tournament, the second being a team of elementary school students.

“Dartmouth 51” took a second place win with its solution to “Top Secret,” a spy-themed challenge that involved using cryptography and steganography. Team members included Potter School’s Rylie DaSilva and Sam Waskiewicz, and Quinn Elementary’s Olivia Bloom-Glover, Tessa Renzo, Benjamin Vieira, Annie Witzig, and Teagan Witzig.

A third team consisting of kindergarten, first, and second grade students participated in a noncompetitive challenge that involved building a simple machine. The team included DeMello Elementary’s Elan Martin; Potter Elementary’s Jackson Goncalves, Jack Longo, and Julian Yarmac; and Quinn Elementary’s Elizabeth Larkum.

Improv 4 was managed by Lynn and Alexis Arruda. Dartmouth 51 was managed by Stephen Witzig. The noncompetitive elementary school team was managed by Joe Yarmac.