If you were asked to summarize PLP in one paragraph, I dont think you could do it without saying “Destination Imagination.” A major part of PLP, my class has taken one more step in out DI journey. This year… was a little interesting.

Unless you live with Patrick Star underneath a rock, you no doubt know about the global pandemic that is affecting everyone’s lives in many ways. Well add DI to that list because instead of the Destination Imagination Provincial tournament being held at Carson Graham as planned, it was cancelled all together due to Covid-19. However, our PLP teachers are not ones to accept defeat and move on without looking at every way to allow their students to participate. Well thats what they did. DI Provincials was still going to happen for PLP students. There is a catch though, and that is that we were going to be presenting over Zoom! 

Zoom is a video calling app, and what many schools and classes are using to continue to learn. 

My group, Ally, Kaden, Alex, Julia, and Meg, did make improvements from the regional tournament. Feel free to read my post about that to see what we decided to fix and why we had so much to fix! Anyways, our first point of improvement was to include more scientific facts into our script. A couple of our group members spent some time watching other groups and they noticed that some of the groups incorporated scientific facts about their species and habitat very well into their presentation. Of course, we should have done this at the start, considering our challenge name is the SCIENTIFIC CHALLENGE! So one of our first orders of business was adding different facts about the black mamba, which wasn’t very hard. We had already done some research about the black mamba when we first decided to pick it as our outsider species.

Another major revision with our Provincials presentation was our Team Choice Elements. Now, I didn’t talk about these in the Regional post, so I really want to focus on them a lot in this post. Our team choice elements were. As follows: a soundboard of various sound effects, and using recycled materials for our snake costume. These were not very strong TCE’s, and it reflected in our scores. Now, we couldn’t really change the costume, as it was at school and we didn’t have access to it, so we focused on our other TCE. 

Meg plays clarinet. Woah! Ben, you gotta explain the plan for that. Oh yeah, whoops. Our plan for our second team choice element was that Meg was going to play a small freestyle piece she put together as our habitat morphed. This was actually very convenient, because there wasn’t a hard technical side to this plan. I did end up having to play a recording of Meg playing, but other than that it wasn’t extremely hard to pull off, and Meg didn’t have to endure the pressure of playing live. 

Performing on Zoom did have its drawbacks. For one thing, we didn’t have any props or costumes. Those were all at school. Another drawback was that if anybody had bad wifi, they could end up getting kicked out of the call altogether. This did happen to one of us during our instant challenge. It was an definitely an interesting experience. Since we didn’t have our snake costume, we ended up having to improvise. Kaden made rat ears that he could put on his hat, Alex collected different articles of clothing that an explorer would wear, and I used my hood as neck flaps, which I could enlarge when i “morphed.” Our props were also at the school, so we had to improvise for our habitat morph. Zoom has a virtual background feature, so our plan was to have two different photos. One of a lush forest, and one of a dying forest. When we morphed, all we had to do was just change our background, which is harder than it sounds. We all had to be coordinated so that our backgrounds changed at the same approximate time. I found it especially difficult to continue talking and at the same time try to press buttons on my screen trying not to lean in to the camera so it looks like I’m actually pressing buttons. 

Unfortunately none of us could record our performance so I can’t show you in this post. If you want to see it, be sure to watch the Oscars, when we win Best Presentation by Grade 9s About Snakes Recorded Over Zoom. Yes, thats a real award. 

All in all, I think this was a good learning experience. It gave us an opportunity to learn how to adapt when something derails our original plans. It gave us a chance to get familiar to Zoom, which we would use a lot in the next month and a half. I must be honest, when I found out we were still going to present for DI, I wasn’t very fond with that idea. But looking back, I’m happy we got the chance to showcase how we improved our presentation, because I think we all came out of it better learners. This was really a great chance to adapt and react with the tools we had, and use those tools to the best of our abilities to make something we are still proud of. This was a great example of how the school system adapted to what is going on in the world, and we are all benefiting from it.