The Destination is Imagination

On Saturday February 25, 2017, my team and I went to Destination Imagination (DI). DI is a competition where teams challenge one another in different categories, such as engineering, technical, scientific, fine arts, and improv. Teams can consist of 2 to 7 members. My team has 4 members, Jessie, Maggie, Melika, and myself and we competed in the “improv” category.u

We needed to do a lot of preparation for this competition. Although we were doing improv acting, we still had to practice various scenes. We had a list of possible genres and characters that could be given to us during the competition. How it works is that a DI volunteer tells us which character and genre we need to use in our improv performance. We have to make up a story and present it in under 3 minutes. The DI volunteers watch your performance and give your team a score. The team needs to do this three times meaning you get 3 different genres and characters and the team acts out 3 different stories.

When we first started preparing for DI, my group and I had no idea what we were going to do. We didn’t know how to prepare for the tournament, and what to expect. Also, we were not the best at improv at that time. For the first 2-3 weeks, all we did was practice different improv scenarios, over and over again. We improved as we got to know one another better, and we got better in using our props.

On the day of the event, we were very stressed out and nervous. When we arrived at DI, there were so many people. We couldn’t find our teachers because it was extremely crowded. The first activity we did was our instant challenge. An instant challenge is a challenge that you have no preparation for. All teams do the same instant challenge. After that, we sat around for 2 1/2 hours before we had to do our improv challenge. We were very scared. We went into the room, and they gave us our genre, character, and story line. We did our first performance, and it went well. That broke the ice and we felt more comfortable doing the other two stories. After the performance we debriefed our improv acting and laughed again about the funny things that happened during our acting of the story. Once we finished our improv challenge, we waited for all the other teams to finish so that we can get our scores.

Usually the scores are presented right after the competition so most people stick around waiting for the results. Unfortunately there were issues with the computers and databases that the DI volunteers used to calculate the final scores, so they could not give the scores out. We decided to go home.

We finally got our scores back a few days later, and my team got in 6th place in our category. We will be going to provincials. It will be held on April 8th, so we have plenty of time to tweak and change our challenge. For the next month, we will be preparing for the next tournament.

Wish me luck 🙂