Every year, PLP students participate in a little thing called destination imagination. If you haven’t heard about destination imagination before, or haven’t read about it in an earlier post of mine, destination imagination is an annual project tournament with all kinds of different challenges to choose from. The challenge that I chose was the scientific challenge. It was called Unlikely location. In this challenge, we were tasked with creating an amusement park attraction that would be located in a place that wouldn’t normally feature a park attraction. I was put into a group with Melika, Marshall, Daniel, Luca, and Adlih. Together, we brainstormed ideas for the story, attraction, as well as where our Unlikely location would reside. After spending a few classes narrowing down all of our ideas, we all came to a consensus that the location would take place on a dream planet called Phoebe. We also had to introduce three scientific concepts that we would use during our performance.
We came up with a storyline to feature our location and attraction, and it starts off with a kid named Richard sitting in classroom while the teacher talks about electricity and how they would have a test later that class. Richard ends up falling asleep in class, and awakes on the beautiful planet of phoebe. He then meets all of its inhabitants, and they show him around. Richard, being the edgy kid that he is, spots a big park attraction because of its shocking resemblance to a fidget spinner. He asks to ride the attraction, but is told that he must take a test before he is able to take a turn on the attraction. After this, everybody ends up moving off stage, and a character named Millard appears. He states to the audience that he is looking for a box of magic that fuels the dream land, so that he can use it to put to his own use and create a land of nightmares. Whilst Millard hunts for the box of magic, he is met by one of the inhabitants named Remmy, who ran into Millard while searching for Roka, who’s is another inhabitant of Phoebe.
Remmy is shocked when she sees Millard, because usually they know about anyone new that enters the dreamland. Roka and Richard arrive and demonstrate the same confusion when they see Millard. They end up dismissing their concern, and show Millard around the park as if he was just another visitor like Richard. Meanwhile, Richard and Roka stay behind to begin the test. Roka tests Richard with questions about things like Newton’s laws of motion, electricity, and gravity. These were the three scientific concepts that we chose to talk about.
Richard finishes the test and is ready to ride the fidget spinner attraction, when Rocco, another inhabitant of phoebe, interrupts them to inform them that Millard had taken all the magic from the dreamland and must be stopped. Everybody goes to search for Millard, but Richard stays behind to watch over the attraction. Millard shows up, claiming that he was putting the magic back, but Richard isn’t convinced. Millard explains that when he came to the the dreamland, there was another kid there that soaked up all the attention of the people, and he was never acknowledged. He claimed that the inhabitants wanted him to leave, and he felt shunned and unwanted. He explained that instead of leaving, he rewound the time and had a plan to do it all over again, but this time he would steal the magic. He expressed his apologies and promised never to do it again. Richard makes a compromise and let’s Millard ride the fidget spinner if he agrees to give back the magic. As Millard rides the attraction, all the inhabitants return and advise Richard to stay away from evil Millard, but then end up accepting him once Richard explains his situation. Richard finally gets to ride the attraction, when he wakes up from his dream. His teacher explains that he fell asleep and his test in now in front of him. The story ends with Richard completing the test and getting all the questions correct on his electricity test.
We had created and edited a script for this story, which was mainly done by Adlih. Also, we had a full sized, working fidget spinner attraction that would actually spin, and could fit one person. The attraction was built by Luca, Daniel, and Marshall. Me and Melika worked on the two huge backdrops, finished the data forms, bought and created all of our props, helped write and revise the script, and organized who would do what and when. The last thing we needed was the music. Luca made a soundtrack that would later be used as our team choice element. A team choice element was something that we added that showed our unique skills and creativity. We needed two team choice elements, one being the homemade soundtrack, and the other being our masks that we created and soldered lights onto. We practiced our performance quite a few times, memorizing our lines and perfecting the little things that needed fixing, and we were finally at a point where we could present.
It finally came down to the day of the tournament and I was really nervous, but I didn’t let that stop me from giving it my all. When it was our tern to present our challenge, everything thing seemed to go smoothly. That was until we were told that our homemade soundtrack couldn’t be our team choice element because the music itself was considered part of the requirements, so the points couldn’t be counted for the second team choice element. Even with this setback, we kept going and just accepted that what’s done is done and it’s just something we need to focus on improving for next time. We kept going with our presentation, and soon figured out that something was wrong with the connection of the speaker and it caused the music to cut in and out, which sounded quite bad after a while, so I ended up just turning it of completely. That was a major problem that we plan on fixing by ether using a different speaker, or just not using a speaker at all, because the music is pretty loud just playing from the iPad. Anyway, we had kept going according to plan and had finished with confidence. Other then those few setbacks, nothing overly disastrous had happened. We ended up getting third place in our category, which wasn’t too bad, but there could definitely be some significant improvement before provincials rolls around. We have already started to plan out how these improvements will be made. We have planned to completely create a new and improved team choice element. This team choice element will be a homemade bongo drum that the magic from the story will be stored in. We are also going to create a holder for the speaker/device that the music will play from, and this speaker holder will be shaped like a tree and will hide the speaker from the view of the audience. Other than some minor tweaking of things that we already have, this is what we plan to complete before the provincial D.I. Tournament.
Destination Imagination has been a great opportunity for me to work on my skills with time management, because without it, our project wouldn’t have come together at all. The main thing that I wish I would’ve improved upon was my ability to better memorize my lines. Other than the few minor setbacks that me and my team members faced, I honestly feel that the work that we produced turned out pretty well, and it was something that I was relatively proud of.
