Hello and welcome back to my absolutely incredible blog post! In todays blog post we are going to be talking about one of the bigger projects our PLP class has had to participate in! In this blog post I’ll be writing about my experience with DI (destination Imagination) and boy I have a lot to say about this project.
Up first we have our driving question: How Might we Learn and Experience the Creative Process While Developing our Creativity, Curiosity and Courage?
Now let me tell you about this !
DI is a competition that mainly focuses on thinking outside the box, or with the materials within the box, to present a team created solution to a specific challenge in a category. My category was fine arts, so my team’s task was created around the elements of fine arts, such as a detailed storyline with technical elements, this challenge definitely took a lot of teamwork and thinking skills, but I’d like to say I improved on my collaborating and communicating throughout this project.
Firstly, the start of DI happened when my classmates and I got placed into our different teams. I got placed in the fine arts challenge, Tricky Tales, with Nolan, Claire, Ewan and Luca. We all read over the challenge outline together and took notes about the main factors we would have to include to create a detailed solution (such as the illusion, story, etc.). Once we finished reading about the story section we got to work on creating a trickster. To complete this challenge we went through these steps: Recognize, Imagine, Initiate and Collaborate, Assess, and Evaluate and Celebrate.
In the beginning, me and Ewan got to work on searching up different history, a lot of our resources came from Norse mythology and Egyptian gods! Which is pretty interesting to be honest. This challenge contained a lot of working together and communicating with each other to make sure we were all on the same page when it came to full ideas and costumes and such!
We started the idea process by coming up with a story theme, which we decided was going to be steampunk. We generally thought that this would be a good theme because it took place in a futuristic world setting, but wasn’t part of an actual timeline and we thought that this would be very interesting to work with. We then came up with several story idea’s that varied from this steampunk theme.
After quite a few ideas, we were able to choose a rough storyline. Our storyline was about a trickster in a steampunk town, in which she played tricks on people and decided to freeze time. Facing a decision of what to do next (the tricky situation), I think this collaborative story idea was one of the many ways that my collaborating skills got better, by interacting with team members to find a good final result, while trying to take everyone’s idea’s into consideration. After the creation of the story was set, we were able to focus on other ideas for the rest of the challenge, specifically the costume transformation and the illusion!
Our idea for the costume transformation stemmed off our steampunk theme. We thought creating mechanical wings would showcase and enhance our created storyline, which I think it ended up doing. The other part of our main challenge was the illusion. If I’m being truthful, this part probably took the longest amount of time to create because we had idea that we was very exotic and would take a large amount of money and time. We originally had the thought that we could play around with the concept of ‘freezing time’ and we thought that if someone spills water during our play, the water would stay still. But that couldn’t happen because that would have required a special water (and we weren’t even sure if it was a real thing to be honest). With that minor setback, we were forced to scrape our minds and think of different ideas and we came to a final conclusion, being that we just needed another object to freeze in mid-air. We then thought back to clocks (because of steam clocks and the steampunk theme) and we came up with the idea that a pocket watch could be floating mid air by just a mere fishing string! With all of this in mind, we were able to start the next important stage: Initiate and collaborate.
To start off this stage, we knew that we needed to create a script, design props, and create solutions. We got to the creation of the script. We were able to make the script during our time at loon lake (which was super fun) I think we all communicated efficiently to one another, which caused us to have a successful product! We then spent the next few weeks turning our imagined designs into reality, such as building the mechanical clock and sewing the costumes. we also had to use some critical thinking skills, to know what exact materials that we would have to be place in certain areas of our set, props, and overall solution. By the end of this stage I think we all had successfully communicated with one another to make sure everything was running smoothly so we could complete our team’s solution.
Then after that, we briefly discussed and assessed our progress so far!
The time was coming quicker than ever and we finally got to present our challenge! When reflecting on said performance, I think we did have some aspects that we could’ve improved on (such as our communication skills toward our audience, which could’ve been done by slower and louder speech). The next stage, Evaluate and celebrate is something im still in the process of doing (evaluation via blog post), I believe I was also able to reflect on our achievements with as a team. I am also reflecting on the final performance because the entire thing turned out better than I expected it to!
Though I can’t say I particularly enjoyed Destination imagination, I can confidently say it improved me as a learner. My communication and group skills improved greatly throughout this project. I was able to develop, understand and improve the three main curricular competencies, I think I improved the most on my team working skills, building relationships with my classmates throughout this project and taking all ideas together, to make one stellar group idea.
Anyways, thank you so much for reading my blog post! I hope you enjoyed it!