If you’ve somehow miraculously been able to follow all of my blog posts from grade 8 you’d know that our PLP class competes in an annual competition called Destination Imagination, or simply, DI.
As always there’s two competitions, regionals and then provincials. Regionals have already come to a close and so we’re set forth on the path to the provincial competition.
This year, for the first time, we were not only going to be competing against another Seycove team (the grade 9 class) but we would also be presenting AT Seycove. As you would know from previous DI posts, you’d know there are always the same six challenge categories, but never the same problem or task. Ever since grade 8 I’ve been dying to do the engineering challenge, since that’s something I’m actually extremely interested in and would love to get a very, very, extremely basic, idea and feel for a task dealing with that topic. But yet again, this was not the year I’d be doing my dream challenge. I was assigned to work in a team of six on my second option, the Techinal Challenge: Maze Craze.
If you actually took the time to watch that, congrats, you now have a very brief idea of our massive task at hand. We had loads to do, so let’s jump right into it shall we?
First thing’s first, the group members who I would be my spending period 7 Maker class with for roughly the next 4 months… Spencer, Izzy, Isobel, Sam, and Calum. We have a very good balance of skills throughout our group. The tech genius/go to coder, Calum. Sam and Spencer can work their way around a wood shop. Our all rounders, Izzy and Isobel. And lastly, yours truly, who’d be handling pretty much all of the
writing.
Brainstorming Islamist always the first step in any PLP project. DI is no exception. This took the shape of writing down (yes, I know, WRITING in PLP. Who woulda thought) the first ideas that came to our minds when we were told a category that had to do with our challenge and project plan. These topics ranged from the story, the Maze Traveler, to our team choice elements (TCE).
These team choice elements are something extra that we had to enhance our story. It can’t be one of the requirements of your core challlenge. They would be worth 15% of our overall score so we really needed them to be high quality. But in every single one of my group we’ve never really pushed ourselves in order to take it to the next level with the TCE.
The next step in the creative process was deciding on our story. Once we had this 100% figured out, we would begin writing the script. We started by looking over our brainstorm notes and decided on a police genre kind of story. We would have two people playing the main character, but have it set in two different time periods. The older one would be narrating the story, as if he’s telling the story to his family. The younger policeman would be acting everything out through flashbacks.
What followed this decision was all the other variables that we had to incorporate into our challenge. The most important one being the Maze Traveler. Use this chart as an example for what sort of work we had to put into each of these decisions:
One of the mandatory planning phases was to do a chart identical to this one for each and every deliverable of our challenge. The Maze traveler would be a bomb seeking/defusing rover that would have to navigate through one of eight random mazes that we would be given two minutes before our performance. Our original idea was for it to navigate through the maze on its own using code, and the aim of that was for us to get more points since we weren’t just using an RC car that we went out and bought.
VISUALS! Yay! These are what we focused on next. Who’s going to play who in the story? That’s a very good question, cause even we hardly knew, and once we did we’d change it once again. What we settled on was…
Spencer: An old man named Rob who is telling the story
Sam: The young version of Rob when he was actually experiencing the story
Calum: Rob’s police partner and childhood best friend, named Thomas
Izzy: An Evil Villian
Kate: A French Evil Villian
Isobel: Police Captain
The main idea of our story was that it was set through multiple flashbacks. Spencer was the older version of Sam, an outgoings police officer that has just graduated out of the
academy where he met his best friend, Thomas (Calum). It’s their first day on the job and a code red alarm goes off, but no one else besides the police captain, played by Isobel, is in the building, so they’re dispatched on their first mission. After receiving their gear they’re sent off to an old apartment building that’s suspected to have
been planted by two villains, yours truly and 
my real life partner in crime, Izzy. She would play the smart one who actually had all of the information, and I would be doing what I do best. Confusing and annoying her with not only loads of questions, but also speaking in French, which she is hopeless with. Rob (Sam) and Thomas then entered the building, which was the maze/16×16 foot squares, following right behind the rover. The two friends would go through the maze and defuse one bomb in one event square, and then passing another one later on.
If you’re really all that interested in our story and want some more visual aid to what I’m talking about, feel free to watch our full performance right here.
Results
I’ll get the most painful thing out of the way first. We were beat by the grade 9’s. Mainly because our performance did not go as planned. For one thing, our rover did NOT work unless you like kicked it across the floor. So that’s exactly what we did…
Don’t believe me? Either just watch the video or have a look at our raw score sheet and the appraisers comments.
Actually, the appraisers really liked some of the aspects form our performance. Which might not be the most evident just by looking at the scores but they told us face to face once we were done, I promise.
The element thye liked the sot was definitely our backdrop. Yes that sounds boring and generic but it honestly looked really good. That’s because it was designed as a story book, since Spencer was technically telling a story, so we thought it would be another cool idea to enhance that aspect of the challenge. Spencer and Sam were the builders behind it, and then all of us spent two classes painting all eight pages.
I hate to bring up team choice elements again but I kinda have to, sorry. The reason I have to talk about them again is because this is where my team can most improve. That’s not only said by us as a group, but by the scores (this is what we scored lowest on), and by our teachers and appraisers. The music that Isobel and I had recorded ourselves playing didn’t play loud enough and hardly at all. The second TCE we chose was for my character to speak French. The judges said they actually really enjoyed that element of the story but there just wasn’t enough of it. So all in all, we’re just going to rethink those for our next performance which is…
PROVINCIALS!!!
YAY!!!
But before that I need to take some time and reflect on Rgioanals and what I think would be great to improve on for the next competition.
Even through our rover was a complete disaster and failed completely, we didn’t get that many points for like.. uh… everything else. One of the things that the appraisers said they really liked was how they could tell we were a team. Not only through our extensive planning but since our performance didn’t go as planned, it required a lot of improv (Not gonna lie I thought I left that challenge behind last year). That’s just what happens after being in the same class for three years now. As always, the biggest thing we need to change is the last minute planning. No one can deny it anymore, we all do it. Leaving a lot of the construction, script rewrites, and prop building until the week leading up to the competition. If we hadn’t have done that we could have practiced with the rober and known ahead of time what wouldn’t work and what needs to be redone.
Overall we have a really strong story line. Thank you for introducing us to plot diagrams in grade 8 and never letting us forget them Ms. Willemse. But honestly that did help, the six of us have become really strong story tellers and that’s really what got us through our Regiaonal competition. Now we just have to try and get enough rehearsal time before provincials.
Here’s to praying that Calum is able to come up with a working rover by the time that competition rolls around again..
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