Destination Imagination is not your standard high school project. There’s no poster boards with paragraphs glued to them, monotone oral presentations or last minute Prezi’s. Destination imagination is a project where you can put your craziest ideas together with friends and channel them into something meaningful. Want to break things? Engineering. Build things? Technical. I chose the fine arts category for acting and and the creating and along with Kai, Adlih, Luca OG, Jessie and Lucas, I went for a wild ride with many ups and downs. A ride that went for a awesome final presentation and a somewhat disappointing ending.
To start off, our challenge this year was very specific. We were challenged to recreate a board game but put our own story into it. My group chose the game of life and we decided we would talk about real world problems like gender stereotypes and the problems of different careers while still including a light, humorous tone. As we came up with the story we had a lot of input and it was a very collaborative process. The reason we remade the story from regionals is because we felt we could get a lot more points if we did so. In the process, I definitely think I improved my skills around collaborative writing. I didn’t have much experience in google docs, five people at once type writing and I think I have a more clear picture of how it works now.
We also had to build all of our new props. The catch was, all of our props had to fit in a 6 by 2 box if we wanted them to be scored for any points. We also HAD to have something called a game gizmo. The gizmo would be related to the story in some way and have any kind of interesting technical element built in. All of this had to be built by us and cost under 150 dollars. Adlih and Jessie worked mostly on painting and background. Luca worked on the game gizmo and me and kai worked on lots of miscellaneous smaller things that had to be done. One such thing was just making sure we had all the props, Monopoly money, baby dolls, and aprons all had to be there for our story to make sense, even if we weren’t the ones making them.
About three or four days before the D.I. provincials championships, I found out our team member, and lead role actor, Jessie, wasn’t going to be able to make it. I offered to take her role but this wasn’t going to be an easy task. I had to learn about 30 lines in 3 days. On top of that, I had to learn how to juggle! Over next few days I spent all of my time doing these things. I went to school and practiced all day, after that I came home and practiced juggling pretty much until I went to bed. It was a lot.
On they day of the presentation I woke up early and started the drive all the way out to Collingwood. Even though I was tired, I was very excited and nervous. My group found a secluded room and we practiced as long as we could. When presentation time came I was ready. Through hard work and persistance I managed to save the presentation for my group and I’m really proud of myself for that. This part of D.I. taught me that a lot is possible when you put 100 percent towards it. My groups presentation went really well. We stuttered a few times and maybe even missed a line or two but considering everything we had been through, it was a great result. Later that day we also did our instant challenge. I can’t say anything about this until the end of May but it did go pretty well.
Unfortunately, one of our group members apparently was talking about the “secret” instant challenge to someone else and the judges found out. Because of this we were disqualified and our scores and all of our work didn’t count. I was really bummed to find this out. Especially considering how hard my team and I personally worked towards our solution. Nobody was happy but we all got over it in time and talked about it later.
Looking back on this part of D.I. and all of D.I. because this is likely my last time participating, I am very happy I did it. D.I. taught me how to collaborate, organize work periods outside of school, be creative, work towards a common goal and so much more. To list all of the skills D.I. has helped strengthen would take far to long. I think the single most important thing D.I. touches on though is teamwork. No matter what challenge you’re doing and what role you’re playing you are always working with a team and over time your teamwork skills build. Simply by participating and being held responsible for different things has taught me to be much more of a team player and much more willing to collaborate. The overarching theme for all of D.I. is really creativity and teamwork and these are also the skills it teaches best.