Hello everyone and welcome back to another blog post. For the past few months (well actually since the beginning of the year, we just started actually cranking a few months ago) we have been working on Destination Imagination (DI) I’ll link to my other post here where I explain all about what DI is. In this post I will be taking you through the long journey that led up to our final presentation a few days ago.

So we were first introduced to our DI teams and main challenge at the beginning of the year, however like I said above, we only really started working on it after winter break. The challenge that I ended up getting was technical. Even though it was last for the choice, I ended up really liking it. Shout out to my teammates Ben, Alfie, Makenna, Sepaus, Sylas, and Declan! You guys helps so much. I loved working with all of you!! 

The very first thing that we did was the team choice elements inventory. This is where we filled out a sheet that had a bunch of questions to determine what skills that we have. This is more about like what you could bring to the team. Take a look below to see what I mean ⬇️ 

After that we started working on the deliverables sheets. A deliverable (for DI at least) means each part of the challenge that earns points. For example, how creative the storyline is earns you a certain amount of points. So everything that we earn points for is called a deliverable. Anyways so we had 8 deliverables and you can see what we had written for them in our Basecamp. We never actually updated it but you get the idea of how many things we had to think about and create.

I think another really important thing that kept us organized as a group was the team roles and responsibilities. This is where we designated everyone to a certain role in the group. For example, I was in charge of communication. This would look like making sure everyone was on the same page in terms of meet ups outside of school, making sure everyone knew what needed to be worked on, and also making sure people knew what up coming deadlines we had to meet in order to complete the solution successfully.

Speaking of deliverables, this brings us to the burn down chart. This was where we could keep track of all the progress and what we did in class. Every class we would “burn down” part of the chart until the end when we had nothing left to burn down.

After we had all of the deliverable stuff out of the way, we started on actually generating ideas. Because this can be a scary task just thinking of ideas, we were given a prompt of an idea generation chat. It was a bunch of boxes where we could just put any and every idea we had about our the solution to our challenge. I think this was a very good thing to do because when we came back and debriefed with our team, we all had a variety of ideas that we could bounce off of.

However in the end I think that the best

So for the technical challenge we had to create two devices, one electric and one non-electric. We also had to create three hazards that both devices would have to overcome. Finally, we had to create a story with a feat of skill and a daring escape that incorporated the devices and hazards. You can see us hard at work on the devices and hazards below ⬇️ 

Next we started working on the story. At the beginning we were really stuck because we tried to write the story then make the devices and hazards around it, but then we realized that we should have been making the devices and hazards before the story. After we changed gears, we were able to much more successfully complete the challenge with a working and actually somewhat good solution. Throughout the course of this project we would revisit our final solution many, many, many times. 

Throughout the whole time of this project we were keeping a budget. I won’t get into all the details of that because it’s pretty boring but yeah, we had to keep a budget. After that we did the tournament data forms. This was where we explained out devices, hazards, and overall solution to the appraisers. The tournament data forms are a really good way to sell your final presentation. Even though it may not be the best, you can try and twist it in a way that makes everything sound good. Well saying like that makes it sounds a little sneaky, it actually helps with your persuasive writing skills. 

There is a video of our final solution which you can check out here ⬇️. However the quaintly of the filming and angles might be weird because of where the parent was sitting.

And there you have it, a brief summary of what DI 2022 was all about. I feel like I learned so much by doing it. I learned about teamwork and how to manage time even when you’re working with friends. I learned about how to organize in a way that I can understand. I learned about building remote control cars. I learned so much about writing a good story and about character development. I also learned a lot about creatively collaborating in and effect and efficient way that produces the best result. I hope you enjoyed this short re-cap of DI!

Best wishes,

-Dana

P.S. Here are some of the judges comments on our presentation: