Hey Y’all, Max here.
The Performance Learning Program has a tradition of entering their Grade 8 ( and I believe 9 ) PLP classes into Destination Imagination, a worldwide tournament that pits teams against each other in different categories of inventive and creative challenges. This year is my second year in PLP, and I was less than excited to be competing, as last year’s DI only reminds me of pressure and deadlines.
The biggest change to this year’s DI tournament and last years was that it would be in-person. This was a huge change to last years challenges, which were not in-person due to COVID-19, and were instead short films that crammed in not only the actual challenge, but also team choice elements, and a full story. Needless to say, last year’s DI was rough, and at times felt overwhelming. But this year would be different, for a number of reasons.
The first hint that we would be doing DI again this year was given to us almost the first month we came back to school from summer break ( I think ). Maybe another two months later, we were finally given our groups, not that we would be working with them anytime soon. It was only in February that I started to work on DI with my team, which by the way was Colton , Erik , Landon , Patrick and myself. We were given the technical challenge. Sylas was once a part of our group, but due to uh, unfortunate circumstances, he was voluntarily transferred to the opposing technical team.
Initially I thought this would either go great or go terribly. Everyone on our team is friends, and it was hard to tell whether we would prosper from our chemistry, or crash and burn from it. An early sign of progress was when, after 30 minutes of name suggestions, all members unanimously voted to call our group the Chi-Town Turkey Burgers.
( unfortunately, somewhere along the chain of communication the name was butchered by one of the PLP teachers and instead we were the “Sha”-Town Turkey Burgers ) The name originally stemmed from the assumption that the grand finals for DI were going to be held in Chicago. You could imagine our disappointment upon finding out they are always held in Kansas City.
PART 1: Recognize
Recognize: “You will know you have mastered Recognize as a team because each team member will have an understanding of the challenge that they can summarize in their own words and identify the challenge requirements.”
Understanding the challenge was a process that took exponentially longer than it should have.
As soon as we got the rules and guidelines for this years technical DI challenge, we went through it and tried to understand what we were actually trying to accomplish. This wasn’t a painful process but at times it felt like the worst thing ever, with our entire group, including me, constantly asking questions we should already know the answers to.
We did eventually learn the rules and guidelines for our challenge, and I’ll try to explain the key points in an understandable way:
- The technical challenge this year was called Daring Escape. In this challenge, our team had to design two machines that would overcome three obstacles.
- Another requirement was a “daring escape” from a “hazardous situation”.
- There are the general Destination Imagination rules for every challenge that also had to be followed / integrated into our performance ( i.e team choice elements, budget, scoring, etc. )
- Additionally, we had to create a story that includes all of the above.
This is very non-specific and there is a ton more stuff to know about the challenge, but unfortunately the combined page count of both the technical and general rule books totals 73 pages so I would be here an indefinite amount of time going into specifics about the rules. Moving on.
PART 2: Imagine / Initiate and Collaborate
Imagine: You will know Imagine is complete when you have defined all the solution goals and created a timeline for completion.
Initiate and Collaborate: There will be lots of collaboration here! It will involve lots and lots of research: interviews, experiments, and reading! You will create many, many prototypes and small-scale models before you get to your full-scale solutions.
I am combining the Imagine and Recognize and Collaborate parts of Destination Imagination. I am doing this because they happen at pretty much the same time in the DI process, and it’s the part where our team figures how we are going to solve the main challenge, as well as figure out what our team choice elements are, and how we are going to find / build / buy any materials necessary. Oh, and we also need to create and manage a progress timeline, and make any necessary changes in productivity if we are lagging behind. All the while doing small practice instant-challenges to prepare us for the real one.
My team actually got off to a pretty great start once we figured out what we were going to do. I’m not sure how it came to this, but we realized that Patrick had expertise in Lego Robotics, so we decided to go with that as the first vehicle ( we also figured out that some sort of Lego products were exempt from the budget ).
We made the car and 1/3 of the obstacles one afternoon in my garage. We didn’t finish the other vehicle or obstacles until another session later in Patrick’s garage. In fact, we didn’t even have a full story until about an hour before the first dress rehearsal ( Erik and I wrote it in pretty much ten minutes over FaceTime ), which is where we decided to use a musical performance as our first team choice element, and dances that accompanies the song as the second. I’m not sure why we decided to use music, but Landon already knows how to write rhymes and perform them, so we just got a YouTube beat and put his lyrics over that. The first dress rehearsal did not go great, but then again we weren’t exactly expected to have a full-length, perfectly scripted and memorized performance, were we?
PART 3: Assess:
Assess: When you are working in the Assess stage of the Creative Process, you are:
- Assessing progress
- Reworking or reimagining ideas
- Practicing presenting the solution
The last part of this step in the DI process is about progress. Personally I think our team had a good start with production of vehicles, obstacles, story, etc. But I think the further we got into DI the less we concentrated. We were making more stuff up on the fly, and our second dress rehearsal was a mess. The third one didn’t even happen, but the fourth one the day before the tournament went okay.
The last thing I would like to mention at this stage is that pretty much every team was sweating buckets about the day of the competition. This wasn’t a regular year where everyone would be watching ( attendance was narrowed down to 10 invitees, teachers and judges ), but it was still a very nerve-wracking day. After all, we haven’t done proper DI before, and this was different and anxiety-inducing. Even our own team was worrying about things we shouldn’t have been worried about, and suggesting things we didn’t have to change.
PART 4: Evaluate and Celebrate
Evaluate and Celebrate: This stage is all about:
- Presenting at a tournament
- Reflecting on and celebrating the experience
This is finally the part of Destination Imagination where our team presents everything we have at the tournament. The specifics of the tournament were changed at the last minute so that it wouldn’t be at Seycove, instead it would be at St Georges, which is close to the UBC campus. This was annoying because now our trip would take exponentially longer. Anyways, it was very straightforward when we got there. The way it was scheduled was that only a few teams would be there at the same time, so the school was relatively empty.
The first thing we noticed was that the performance space was very different from the main PLP room we had rehearsed in. We had planned where everything goes on the stage, but we had to quickly go over everything one last time. We also faced a disaster minutes before we were scheduled to perform; the gravity-powered machine didn’t go into the tunnel properly. We had already remade the tunnel twice and if this part didn’t work then we were essentially screwed.
Our performance went good. Great, by our standards. There was a lot of improvisation we didn’t account for but it went alright in the end. The gravity powered machine somehow worked much to our relief and the story was so well-rehearsed no one even forgot or messed up their lines ( except Colton ). My immediate feeling after our seven minutes were done was pure relief. I was so worried that the last 3 months would mean nothing if we messed up our performance with one mistake, and I was glad that nothing went ( seriously ) wrong.
We still had the instant challenge to got through so we couldn’t rest just yet. I can’t say much about the instant challenge because of an interference contract, but in my opinion, our quickly-thought out performance went well, we just didn’t have enough time.
PART 5: Final Thoughts
Ultimately, I think this year’s Destination Imagination went well. I think I remember a mostly negative experience with last years DI, and that’s why I was dreading it this year. I know I had no power in choosing my group, but it felt like some sort of test when I learned who my group was, like the PLP teachers were testing whether we could work well together, or whether we would fail spectacularly. I think we did neither, yet we still got through it in one piece.
Am I looking forward to next years potential DI? Not entirely, but at the very least I will be prepared for it.
FULL DESTINATION IMAGINATION PERFORMANCE: