Hey guys it’s Ben and on March 9th Seycove hosted Destination Imagination. Destination Imagination, or DI, is a series of challenges where a group of students needs to find a creative solution. My group, Liam, Alex, Emily S, Holly, Matthew, and myself were assigned a challenge called Monster Effects. In Monster Effects we need to build a structure using a certain list of materials and a budget of about $200. That structure will be put under stress by the placement of weights. The placement or removal of the weights will trigger a special effect of a teams choice that they will build. This special effect must cause the appearance of a monster in the story, which is why it’s called Monster Effects.
My group’s start to this project was a little rough. Half of our group, myself included, wasn’t really working on DI but kind of messing around. Our first thing we needed to do was create an idea generator. Everyone in my group would go home and come up with ideas for every aspect of our problem. We did this about 3 or 4 times during DI. For one of our team choice elements we were having trouble coming up with an idea so Ms. Willemse told us to do an A to Z idea generator.
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Suddenly DI was only 3 weeks away. My group started assigning people tasks. My tasks were to make a dance with Liam. We were dancing to the Power of Love. My other tasks was to create a background song for our second team choice element. Basically, I was in charge of the team choice elements. My group started to get really stressed and suddenly we were staying after school to work on it every day for 2 weeks.
DI was my life. For 2 weeks, my whole group devoted most of their time to working on DI. Everybody was finishing their task and before you knew it, we had a finished solution, costumes, structure, and all. We were ready for the challenge.
Destination Imagination finally arrived. 2 months of worked will finally pay off. Like I said before, Seycove was hosting Destination Imagination this year. Over 1 thousand people showed up at our school with dozens of teams presenting just like us from around the region. There were six challenges for 3 age groups. I already said my groups challenge was Monster Effects, but our age group was middle year, which is the most competitive group of DI. My group would present at 2:20, so we would be the last group to present. But before that we had to complete an instant challenge. An instant challenge is a problem that we had no idea about before we entered the room. We then have a certain amount of time to solve that problem. We can get a maximum of 100 points from the instant challenge. My group had the best instant challenge performance ever for our group. Sadly that is all I can say. Instant challenges are classified because they may reuse the challenges for Provincials and Globals. For my groups main challenge, we were a little unprepared. We didn’t consider certain things and it caused us to run out of time.
We weren’t expecting to win anything since we ran out of time but we actually came in first for the main challenge and the instant challenge. Even though we messed up on time management and putting the weights on our structure, the appraisers (judges) liked our costumes, team choice elements, and overall our creativity. But the thing that won it for us was our performance in the instant challenge. I really learned a lot from Destination Imagination though. I learned that in order to have a good solution, your team must work well together and add on to each others ideas. I also learned that it is better to finish early so that you have time to improve and add things to your project. You must treat everyday like it is the final week before DI. Anyways, thank you for reading and I will see you all soon!