My school participates in a project tournament called destination imagination. About a month ago, we had DI regionals. After regionals my group, Logan, Emily, Robin, Austin and I, had to critique and edit our performance. The first thing we did was look back at what went wrong at our performance at regionals. At regionals, our performance didn’t really go as planned. We didn’t even get to finish it before we ran out of time. My group was so focused on other little things in the performance, that we lost sight of the big picture. My group was so worried about fixing and detailing things, that we didn’t spend enough time practicing how to encrypt and decrypt the codes like we were supposed to. Overall, we needed to spend more time on the codes, script, and performance part, instead of worrying about smaller things that we could, in theory, do without. We decided that the reason why we ran out of time, was because our script was too long and took to much time to memorize. We needed to take our three pages of script, and cut it down to one page with short lines, easier to memorize. We also decided that we would practice as much as we could, and review our form of code that we created. The most of our class time, was spent cutting down the script and running through lines. When we cut lines to minimize the script, we only cut lines that were unneeded and didn’t emphasize the storyline or give us points.

We were finally finishing up the script and practicing our lines, when we were told that one of our group members was not able to make it to provincials. As devastating as it was, with only a day or two remaining we had to think on our feet and quickly swap in some lines to another group member. It was a stretch, but I knew that if anyone could do it, it was us. The days went by and provincials was only hours away. I didn’t know if I should have felt nervous or exited, maybe a little bit of both! When I walked in the doors of the school that was hosting the event, the first thing I did was check in with my group, and the teachers. After that, my group and I had about two hours until our instant challenge, so my group decided to wander the long halls of the school that was at least three times bigger than what I was used to at mine.

We had to check in to the instant challenge at least 20 minutes before it started, so once we found the check in, we did just that. Eagerly awaiting the instant challenge, my group sat nervously at the check in until they called us in. When we walked into the room for the instant challenge, the first thing we saw were a bunch of judges, each wearing big funny hats of all different colours, shapes and sizes. To this day, I am still confused about the whole hat thing at DI, maybe it’s just a weird tradition, who knows. Anyhow, one of the judges welcomed us in, and straight away began reading the challenge instructions/outline. If you looked on the floor, there were squares taped onto the ground, each containing a letter, some having the same letter as others. For each letter, there was a certain amount of points given. In the middle of all the tape boxes, there was a small log resembling a tree trunk. The instructions were to basically use the materials given to you, to make branches and get them to touch the inside of the boxes, to give you points. The branches couldn’t be attached to the trunk, only touching. Also, the branches could not hit the ground unless it was in one of the boxes. My team decided to make the branches attached to a cup that would rest on top of the makeshift trunk. The most of the branches touched the boxes containing letters that would give us the most points. We made the actual branches out of paper clips, straws, and mailing labels, but ran out of straws, and ended up using rolled up paper instead. It was easy to agree on an idea, because of how well my group worked with each other. We never just said no to someone else’s ideas, we only further expanded on them. I think it’s safe to say that we all walked out of there feeling pretty good, at least I did.

Now that that was over and done with, all we needed to worry about was the main challenge, the performance that took the most work and preparing for. While passing time and waiting for the main challenge, I wandered around and ended up watching some of the other presentations along the way. When it was finally time to check in for the main challenge, we had gathered all of our props and forms, and were ready to nail our presentation. Here are the videos of us preforming!

I felt awesome once the whole thing was over. Aside from occasionally getting cut off, our performance was spot on! We didn’t run out of time, we successfully decoded the message, we didn’t mess up or miss any Important lines, and we even made people laugh! The rest of my time at DI was spent walking around and waiting to get the raw scores. We got our raw scores, which apparently didn’t count for much, because they were not yet averaged out with everyone else’s. Meaning, you could’ve got a 20 out of 100 and got first place, because none of the other groups scored any higher than 20. The only reason for the raw scores, was to see what elements in your performance were better than others. At last I was finished with DI and all that was left was the award ceremony. All of the teams from all over gathered in the gym. The first awards given, were the ones from the previous tournament. They were not given out at the previous tournament because of a computer mouth function, but at regionals, my group got third for the main challenge and first in the instant challenge. I couldn’t stay for the rest of the awards but I know that we ended up getting first place in both things!

Overall, DI was an unforgettable experience that has taught me to think in a more creative way than ever before. I feel like the amount learned from this learning process will better me in many ways, such as thinking outside the box, dealing with people you don’t always agree with, and keeping my cool when faced with stressful situations. DI was something different, and I will never forget it!