Hey guys so my last post was about Destination Imagination at the Regional Tournament. Well now I am going to be talking about my groups experience at the Provincial Tournament. But first, for any who doesn’t know what Destination Imagination is then you are about to find out. Destination Imagination is a worldwide non-profit group that helps students work together and solve challenges as a team. It is led by volunteers and teaches students of all ages the STEM principles and “21st century” skills. My class has been split up into 5 groups, with each of those groups working on a separate challenge. My groups challenge is called “Monster Effects”. We have to design a structure using limited supplies that will support as much weight as possible while being under 9 inches and 175 grams. This structure will be built into a story and will trigger a special effect whether by the placement or removal of these weights. While this is happening, our groups had to come up with two “Team Choice Elements” that show off our creativity and interests. I will be talking about those later as they played a major role in our placement.

So after our Regional tournament victory (click here to read more), our group selected three things that could be improved and fixed. Our first and primary problem was one of our Team Choice Elements. We had two team choice elements, a dance, and a background song. As the background song was pretty bad(I made it), we decided to make a mural that would be painted by our group. But first we needed to figure out what was going to be done and when, because Spring Break was only a week away and two thirds of our group would be going on vacation for the whole two weeks we had off. So we made burndown charts. Burndown charts are charts that show our progress on whatever we were working on. So we made one for our mural, and the other two problems, which was the script, which could improve, and our backdrop that had broken during our last performance.

Soon enough Spring Break was over, everyone was back home, and the Provincial Tournament was only 6 days away!!!. Over the break Liam had built a backdrop that was sturdy, strong, able to paint on, and it wouldn’t break during our performance. So Holly, Alex, Emily, and myself got to work on painting our mural while Matthew, who was in charge in our script, made leaps and bounds in improving our script. 3 days away and we decide on a new special effect. Instead of a LED light, we went with a disco light that Liam had brought from home.

Above is a video of our performance. If you cant hear our voices don’t worry, it isn’t your speaker. We spoke pretty quietly as we weren’t prepared for the size of room we were gonna be in. We ended up coming in third and came first in our instant challenge with a raw score of 93 points (out of 100)!!! The raw scores and our score sheet will be down below as well as a chart of our scores from both tournaments. I really learned a lot from DI. I learned how to cooperate with others and combine ideas to create something better. I really had fun with this years tournament and I can’t wait for next year. Although, if i could do anything different, I would treat every week like the last week of DI. My group was not very productive in the first few weeks leading up to DI and we were scrambling to catch up ever since. But even with that said, I am very proud of what we accomplished and built. That’s all for now… Stay cool🥶😎