Welcome to the D.I Regionals.

D.I stands for Destination Imagination, and it’s a competition between schools and grades Although there are new challenges every year, there are normally a set of five different ones, including Scientific challenges, Engineering challenges, Fine Arts challenges, Improv challenges, and Technical challenges. This year my group is participating in the Engineering challenge, which is called “In The Cards”. The challenge demands that we make a bridge consisting only of cards and duct tape.

And, if that doesn’t sound challenging enough, we have to make a backdrop and skit to go along with it.

My reflection today will be about what happened leading up to the D.I Regional competition. I will be breaking up the beginning into two pieces. #1: Planning and #2: Building. I will only be covering the beginning because I wasn’t able to make the challenge this year.

Phase #1: Planning

Phase one, as you know, was all about planning. In all of our four milestones, we had to figure out ideas, roles, and time management. This was the milestone that played into our curricular competency, “Research and understand”. In this milestone, everyone in the group was involved. This, turned out to be a little bit of a challenge. With the whole team giving their opinions, it didn’t seem like anyone was on the same path. Eventually, everyone calmed down and we were able to come up with ideas that everyone liked. The biggest talk that our group had was, appointing people to certain topics and positions. For example in our matrix:

I am am one of the elemental headers, Ciara is heading props + costumes, Brenton and Tom are on tools, and the rest are mostly team decisions. I also realized looking back, that we came up with really good ideas because our group is good at expanding. We can take a question, and even once we have an answer,

Phase #2: Building

The next phase was (in my mind) where things went downhill before they went uphill. Our group started off strong, but we got a little unmotivated. We weren’t spending as much time on things as we should have, like building our set piece or our team choice elements. Instead of all putting equal time into different things, we only focused on our bridge. It was a major disappointment to find out that our bridge didn’t work in the actual presentation. And, because we had poured so much time into instead of focusing on other ways to build it, we didn’t have anything to fall back on. When looking back, I feel that everyone could have done better. I know that I could’ve definitely done better, mostly bu helping out more and being more available. I’m on a path to do that for the upcoming provincials contest.

Conclusion:

In the end, I believe that our team started off strong but went downhill from there. However, our team was also missing a person (me) and I feel like that might have put some extra pressure on their shoulders. I also know that everyone could’ve done a little better when it came to the team work and time management. So, in conclusion, we have things to work on and we will be prepared for the next competition.

Please visit my teammates: