Hey guys, for this last term we have been working on something called Destination Imagination. Destination Imagination or DI is a competition that is based around different skills that will help all those who participate succeed later in life. There are 6 challenges you can enter in if you are over the age of 7, if you’re younger then that you can enter the rising stars category. The six categories are: technical, fine arts, engineering, improv, scientific, and service learning, however Ms.Willemse decided to not have us do service learning so there was only 5 challenges for us to choose from. To figure out which challenge we were going to do my teacher had us complete a google form that got us to say our top three picks for the challenges and the one challenge we would hate to have to do. Once we did that all we had to do was wait for our teams to be created.
I believe that it had been about a week after we submitted the forms that we got our teams, it was one of the most stressful part of DI. When we were sorted we weren’t told what challenge we were doing we were just told where to sit and soon your table would have four other members at it. My team consisted of five members: me, Felix, Malaika, Thomas, and Emily.M, and all I remember from that day is thinking to myself “Great, I’m stuck with all the chatty people. Looks like were going to fail!” Turns out having the talkative people actually really helped my team come up with ideas. Looking back on our work now I think our team was perfect for the challenge we were given, Improv.
My team was tasked with researching 8 different figure heads on coins from around the world and the tragedy and comedy genres. We also had to practice something called the flip, the flip is basically a peice of paper that is put in front of you when you’re preforming and on that paper is a totally random thing that has to happen in your skit right away. You also have to switch from the first genres to the second one and from verbal to non-verbal. Reflecting on our productivity for the first few weeks I have to say we did close to nothing, we got into the mindset that since we’re improve we don’t need to do anything. That we can just wing it and we’ll be fine, because of this it lead us to be racing to find facts about the characters a few weeks or so before the tournament. We also had to research tragedy and comedy genres since we had to present both in our skit, I don’t believe any of that research ever happened. Overall, we were pretty bad at any sort of research which lead to undeveloped characters and sloppy transitions from genres to genres.
Skip ahead to one week before regionals and my team is still a disaster, our skits make no sense, the characters have no personality whatsoever, and we’re still are playing games when we should be working. Luckily Ms.Willemse set us straight by just out right telling us we suck, we started to practice random skits using the way it would be done at DI, we also played some acting games that really helped us with making up stories and having characters come to life. The last few days were the most stressful because we suddenly had to make a team identification sign that had our name and number on it. We actually finished it the day of the tournament! (By the way our name was 1-800-IMPROV-4-KIDS, and if you don’t think that’s the best name ever your wrong.)
Finally it was regionals, the day was amazing, there was food galore, all the challenges were awesome to watch, and there was a dance party at the end. For now I’ll just talk about our challenge solution, when we presented basically all of PLP came to watch so there were some high stakes. Looking back we were actually very efficient in the planning time because we only get two minutes to plan the skit and we planned almost everything that was going to happen. The presentation was good and I believe we handled the flip well, we probably should have done it a little later but it is what it is. What I’ve learned from this experience is that sometimes you really can’t leave things until the last minute because if you do the consequences will be severe. (P.S. we also won 1st!)
