Destination Imagination and the Medical Men of Mystery (or MMM for short)

Each year our PLP classes from grades 8-10 participate in Destination Imagination Competitions as part of our program. I found this on the Destination Imagination BC Website:

BC Original Minds Association has been a leader in creative problem-solving programs for British Columbia students since 1983.  Since 1999, BCOMA has held the license to offer Destination Imagination in British Columbia, a project-based learning opportunity that blends STEM with the Arts and social entrepreneurship.  Students in Kindergarten to Grade 12 who participate in Destination Imagination improve in creative and critical thinking, build on their unique strengths, learn how to design and manage a project, and gain communication, critical thinking, creative and collaboration skills.

https://destinationimagination.ca/tell-me-more-about-di/

You can see from the definition, especially the project-based learning parts, how well this fits with PLP. It is also a lot of fun and one of my favourite things that we do. I competed in DI twice before joining the PLP program, once making it all the way to the Global Finals that were in Knoxville Tennessee that year.

On the day of Destination Imagination (DI), you have two different challenges you have to complete. One is the Instant Challenge, and one is your performance challenge. Let’s talk about the Instant Challenge first.

For the Instant Challenge what happens is your team is brought into a room with only the appraisers in it. They give you a sheet of paper and you read out what you have to do. It can be a building challenge, a performance challenge, or both. In the briefing before you do your challenge, you get an explanation about what elements are worth how many points in the challenge. Teamwork and creativity earn the most points most of the time. Your team has 20 minutes to talk about, come up with a plan and then present your solution to the challenge. They re-use the Instant Challenges throughout the levels of competition each year so we aren’t allowed to talk about what we did for our Instant Challenge until the Global Finals are done.

The second part is a performance-based challenged from one of the categories of challenges. The categories are always Technical and Service, Fine Arts and Improv, and Engineering and Scientific. What the challenge is changes every year. This year my team (Alex, Amelia R, Jason , and Sam) decided to take on the Scientific Challenge.

We had to create a disease, or research a disease that already exists, and how it effects the human body. We then had to create a story around the disease that included stage blocking, or telling the story from two different perspectives, and have a “Symptomatic”. The Symptomatic had to be a physical representation of what the disease does to the human body.

The disease we used is a real disease called musical hallucinations. For our Symptomatic we made a skull that split open and showed with lights the areas of the brain that were affected by this disease. Here is a video of our performance.

My experience this year was really good. My team got along really well and understood each other so there weren’t any challenges with team dynamics this year. I am still recovering from my concussion and the noise and busyness of the competition gave me a horrible headache. My team was amazing and set up in a room that was away from everyone and were really supportive in helping me get settled in a quiet and dark place and let me rest until it was time to get ready for our performance. Fortunately, the Advil kicked in right before we went on stage so I was able to remember my lines.

Our performance went really well, but we were about 10 seconds too long on time to be able to get in our concluding statement, which is really funny. Otherwise, I think our performance was really smooth. Since the competition, we have reviewed our performance and have a few upgrades we want to do to our set to try to improve how things look, and cutting out some lines to make sure we can fit that last statement in. We are still early in the improvements phase but we placed 3rd in our category so we are on to the Provincial Tournament next.

Stay tuned….