As time goes on, school changes greatly because of a number of factors. One thing that hasn’t changed since the beginning of high school though is our annual spring project destination imagination (“affectionately” named D.I.). In D.I. you and your group are given one of many challenges. In my case the fine arts challenge. In my groups challenge we had to perform our portrayal and unique story that surrounds one of today’s board games. Along with our story we made costumes, backdrops and several required mechanical/electronic elements that add to our performance. Every challenge is performed live in front of judges. Now that the concept of D.I. is in your head let’s go back to the beginning and how we ended up at our final solution to the fine arts challenge. 

At the start of D.I. you do a lot of mental work before actually building anything. This is because everything needs a detailed plan and role. Everything needs to be thought about, from our team name (The Kabobz) to what kind of electronics people will be wearing. In this stage of D.I. We were mainly just brainstorming, collecting all of our good and our cohesive ideas, along with finding suitable roles for our group members. 

The next step was actually building all of the physical aspects of our solution. This was challenging because we had a lot of things to construct, paint, buy and not much time to do it. We solved this by organizing meeting times outside of school at people’s houses to get in our finishing touches. In this stage of the game is when I started pulling a bigger role in our group and being able to contribute more. I helped a lot with the game gizmo which was a top hat with a built in electrical life the game spin wheel. When you pressed a button, the wheel on the hat would spin and land on a number. During this part of D.I. we also started to finalize our script. In my opinion our script was definitely one of the strongest points of our whole project. Jessie was the main writer but we all definitely chimed in a little bit.  One other thing we had to build was called the container. Because we are in the fine arts challenge everything that will contribute to our score would have to be in a container that fits through a standard doorframe. This includes costumes and props and we actually made our container able to unfold into a background that we painted. 

After plenty of brainstorming, building, and rehearsing we were all ready for our final performance. For the regional competition which is the first of two annual competitions, we host so we don’t have to move our props and so everyone competing from other schools don’t have too. Our performance was later in the day at around 1:30 which gave us plenty of practice and last minute fix time from our 8 o’clock arrival. I think on the day of, I played a really big role. I played a big role not by having lots of lines but when veryone was nervous or stressing I was always able to get the team back on focus and back to practicing. When our performance time came around we were all very nervous because relatives, friends and strangers were all watching. Somehow, we pulled everything off super well. Everyone knew their lines, where to be and what to do the whole time. After we presented everyone clapped and we were super excited to have done so well.

 By the end of the day at around 5 we got all our scores back. We thought we would have gotten better raw scores but we just took this as motivation to do better at provincials.

All in consideration I think this year me and my group have done better than any year previous. I can honestly say that this was the first time I was really, really happy with our end result and I’m excited to see how much better I will do at provincials. One thing I would do different and that I will change, is personally looking at the rules more in depth. This is because knowing the rules really well can make it so you get more points without any more work. This will come in handy because with more time to focus on other things I can really up my acting and costume etc. One thing I want to change as a group for provincials is our team choice elements. Our team choice elements were not functioning properly and this made a big impact on our scores. All in all, another successful D.I. Tournament.