Hey there,
This term I was a part of a “competition” called Destination Imagination and now its time to make a blog post about it.
Destination Imagination (DI) is a volunteer-led, educational non-profit organization that teaches “21st century” skills and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) principles to kindergarten through university level students by collaborative problem solving challenges. This is a global organization that many countries like Vietnam, Mexico, Nigeria and many more.
DI may seem small but in reality, its huge! Destination Imagination receives about 150,000 participants annually, 38,000+ volunteers, and 750,000 hours volunteered annually.
My class was split up into 2 classrooms and in each room there were about 4-5 teams of about 6 people. I was put into the “blue” classroom and sat down with my new group members. Together we managed to name ourselves the Mechanized Mechanical Mechanics (MMM) and prepared for the coming challenges and events.
https://www.destinationimagination.org
My group was in engineering which meant that we had to make a video and build a building that incorporated 2 different style features which were postmodernism and renaissance and 2 style elements that were the use of another language and some mini furniture that was built by one of my classmates.
We started off by making a model of our building and then using it to guide us into building the actual creation. We decided to build a rec-centre that had an outside postmodern look and an inside renaissance theme to meld the 2 different style features together.
To try and use the time we had as much as we could, we split into groups to finish tasks. Two people worked on the script for the video, two others worked on the design of the building, and two researched postmodernism and renaissance architecture.
My group then pulled through and met up one day to build the actual model of the building and finished the layout. With the help from one of my group mates, our model actually looked like a building.
Filming actually moved quite smoothly as we were able to get most of the shots at school. Our story was about a couple of elderly people building a rec-centre that stood out in Portland to bring people of all ages together.
Aside from filmmaking and the smaller tasks that were given, there were instant challenges. Instant challenges are pretty much what they sound like. They’re challenges that are given to your group and you have a certain amount of time to come up with the final product. To prepare us for the actual instant challenge, our teachers and a couple of Gr.12 students set up a room with tables and supplies that we would need. They then acted as the appraisers ( judges but positive) and gave the feedback to everyone as a whole.
In the end, everyone did their parts and the videos and challenges were finished on time. We then watched every teams videos and had a couple laughs on the last day to kind of celebrate the work we’ve done.
Overall it would have been much easier to complete tasks if all group members were on task and were focused on the topic that was being discussed. It was a good experience and it was nice to see what I’m going to be doing in the future.