Destination Imagination… An event where teams clash and competitors show their imagination and teamwork.

Destination imagination 2017 regionals was an exciting and awesome experience that I’m so glad I could be a part of this year. About a month before the actual event my classmates and I chose a challenge that we would solve and then present at the regional event. I had the choice of doing the Fine Arts challenge, Improv, engineering, scientific, community outreach, or the technical challenge. I chose the engineering challenge. In this challenge, competitors had to build two or more wooden structures out of balsa wood and glue that would hold weight, and then make a story about two nations coming together to solve an international issue that uses the structures in it. I chose this challenge because I love to work with wood and I thought the idea was really interesting. I also thought that integrating these structures into a story would be hard and fun to do, and I love a good challenge!

Once everyone’s challenge choices were submitted we were put into teams. My team consisted of Adam, Spencer, Lucas, Sam, and of course, myself. As soon as I met up with my group, we were off to the drawing boards. First we had to come up with an international issue. Each group member had their own ideas, but in the end we settled on global warming. We did this because we all agreed that global warming is a very current and real problem and we wanted to explore it further.  After sketching out the global issue for our story it was time to make a script for the performance. My group and I found that we couldn’t get much writing done in class, so we decided to meet on the weekend to create the script. In the end we decided to have the story revolve around the idea of sending people to a new planet similar to Earth named Gargantuan.

After the script was done we started to make the backgrounds and props for our performance. We made four main backgrounds. There was a barren wasteland which represented planet Earth after it had been destroyed by global warming, a space diagram which showed the solar systems of Earth and Gargantuan and a plotted path between the two, a construction site, and a porthole of a spaceship where we would project an animation of our launch and journey. This was one of the most fun parts of the whole project for me because I loved painting with my friends. I also thought that we did a pretty good job making them too.

After making the props we moved onto making the balsa wood structures. Since we had to use these structures in our performance we made one look like a rocket ship, and the other was the rocket ship support. The building process was pretty easy, and I enjoyed designing them.

Once we finished everything we performed in front of the class as a test run, but things could have gone better… the performance was really shaky and we had yet to remember our script, but I’m really glad we did it. We got a lot of really good feedback back that helped us improve our final presentation. First we decided to change the background holder. I guess two chairs, some hockey sticks, and a lot of tape didn’t look “professional” enough, it really didn’t. We also decided to make our script longer and more in depth. After revision my group and I had finished our project, we were proud of it, and it was time to present.

The presentation day was very long.  My day went from six in the morning to about five at night. This year, the tournament was held at Saint George’s School for Boys, when I got there I understood why the tuition fees were $24,000 a year as the school was amazing. Most of the day was spent just sitting around doing nothing. Our time slot to perform was at 3:20 pm, and the only other activity we had was an Instant Challenge at 11:00. An instant challenge is basically a random problem or event thrown at a team to test their ability to problem solve in a short amount of time. Our instant challenge consisted of my group and I finding a way to transport a ball down a pipe to a mark at the bottom. I think we did a pretty good job on it.

After some hours of waiting it was our time to present. 30 minutes before our performance we weighed our structures to make sure they fit the criteria of being under 25 grams.  To our shock they were overweight by a lot, which forced us to scramble around and shave as much wood off as we could. As the stressful few minutes until 3:20 ticked away we managed to get our structures under the weight limit, but we could tell that the structures were weakened by the cuts we had to make.

As my team and I walked onto the stage I started to get pretty nervous. The first bit of the performance went pretty well, but it started to go downhill from there. As we brought our very weak structures onto the stage I started to worry. As soon as they put the first weight onto them they broke. As Lucas desperately tried to reposition them so at least we would get points the time was ticking off. We only had 8 minutes to perform and we were running out of time. After giving up on the weights we continued our performance, and halfway through the last part of it we ran out of time. It could have gone better.

Somehow we managed to progress to the next round. I’m really happy we did because I have learned a lot of important skills for next time, such as always have a second plan, or to double check the weight before the performance. The audience gave us some supportive comments that made me a little bit happier, at least they enjoyed it!

In all Destination Imagination taught me a lot of valuable presentation skills, and it was definitely worth all the hard work and effort.

I will see you at Destination Imagination Provincials!