DI MMM’s become just M&M’s for Provincials

Destination Imagination is a competition that PLP groups from Grades 8-10 enter each year. It offers a creative way to express your learning through a competition format with Instant Challenges and a Performance Challenge. It’s actually pretty fun. Our team this year (Medical Men of Mystery or MMM), competed in the medical challenge where we had to come up with a story about a disease where we could show the symptoms in the body using a visual, called a symptomatic. In our performance, we also had to include something called Double Vision. That is where you have to make a scene from two different perspectives, but it is one scene. My team was Amelia R, Alex, Jason,and Sam. First we had to compete at the Regional level, then, if we do well enough, we move on to the Provincial level . If your team does well enough at the Provincials, they can compete at the Global Finals with teams from around the world. Since we placed 3rd at Regionals, we moved on to the Provincials. Here is the link to my post about Regionals: Destination Imagination and the Medical Men of Mystery (or MMM for short)

Between Regionals and Provincials, we used feedback from the judges at Regionals and our own team opinion about our performance, to improve for the Provincial competition. One of the things we worked on was the Double Vision part of our performance. Our stage blocking wasn’t the best it could be with just a cardboard box covered in green paper to “split” the scene. We improved this with some camouflage material that I brought in to build a bigger “block”. We tried out a couple of designs and finally chose to go with a wooden base with sticks and the camouflage material on it.

The next thing we improved was our symptomatic, which is how we show our disease. Our symptomatic is a skull that opens up to show the two halves of the brain with lights that light up to show the areas our disease affects. Amelia worked really hard on the art work and making it look like a real skull, but it didn’t show very well just putting it on the ground, and it was a bit lopsided. So we straightened it out and made a hinge so it opened better, showing off our improved and now colourful brain.

The third thing we changed, was to write me out of the script. As I mentioned before, there are several levels of competition for DI. The first was Regionals, for us the Lower mainland area, then those who do well move on to the Provincial tournament. At Provincials all the teams from BC who did well enough in their Regional tournaments come together to compete as well as teams from other areas like the Yukon, or Alberta, and sometimes from as far away as China. The atmosphere at Provincials is even louder, busier, and more exciting than at Regionals. And this is where the problem was.

I am recovering from a concussion and at the Regionals, despite my teams very best efforts to keep me out of the busy, noisy parts of the competition, I got a really bad headache. One of the worst headache I have ever had in fact. And I knew Provincials would be even worse for triggering my symptoms. I made the decision with my doctors, my parents, my teachers, and my team that I wouldn’t be competing in the Provincials. So I don’t have anything cool and exciting to blog about even though I missed the tournament. I really wish I could have gone because we did really well, and I wish I could have seen and helped with the performance.

I feel I really learned a lot doing this project, even though I couldn’t perform in the final tournament. Taking the feedback we received from the Regionals to make improvements to our performance is tedious, but has a really big pay off when it works. This process of taking feedback to make improvements mirrors what we do with all of our projects in PLP, not just DI. Being able to accept criticism and feedback on something you have worked really hard on and using that to improve puts you ahead of the competition in life.

To end on a high note, here is the video of my team’s second place performance!