Destination Imagination has turned into a tradition for PLP Every year classmates come together to form teams, create performances and present in front of the world. It’s D.I. time again in PLP and this year, Seycove had the opportunity to host the regional competition. 

The first step of D.I. involves picking a challenge. I chose the Engineering challenge called the Drop Zone. This happens to be the same challenge I picked last year, I wanted to see I could improve my previous performance. After everyone was assigned their challenge we met up with our group to start debriefing the project requirements. I was with Mimi, Claire, Ruby, and Adam. This year the premise of the challenge was quite similar to last year, you drop weights on a structure and see how long it could last standing, but the way the story had to be told was very different. We had to design and present a story about a sudden event that impacts something of our choice and we had to include a hand-built structure that weighs under 175g that will withstand weights being dropped on it. We have to include an Event Depictor (something that will visibly or audibly enhance the dramatic impact of the story) and also two Team Choice Elements (elements in the story in which the team shows general interests or strength in). At first, our group decided to make our story a murder mystery and to have our structure be the murder weapon. We soon came to the conclusion that this would not work and we ended up scrapping the idea. We needed a topic that tells a meaningful topic, not just some tongue and cheek murder mystery comedy. That’s when we came up with our next, and final storyline, we would be telling the story of a high school girl that suffers from anxiety. Anxiety is a very real and serious topic that we felt we could shed some light on. 

Most of our class time was spent creating the script and thinking of our two Team Choice Elements. We had already brainstormed and thought of the Event Depictor and we knew it would be something that sets of the student’s final big anxiety attack. Our performance had a limit of 8 minutes and our script took about that long to read out. We had a lot of memorization to do… The script took a while to finish, and even once it was done, constant revisions were made fixing up parts of the dialogue. If you want to see the full script visit Mimi’s blog. I think the script turned out very well, it had the right amount of comedy mixed with serious storytelling.

Once we had a clear understanding of our story we started to plan out our props and Team Choice Elements. Here is where we learned our team’s strengths.  Adam and I love to work with wood, we take woodwork class every other day during school. We were put to the task of building the Event Depictor and Structure. We decided the Event Depictor would be a podium where the student is presenting, so I mainly built that. Adam focused in on the Structure that would hold weight. He played around with certain shapes using cork and finalized with a cylinder design. The first model was too heavy and it ended up breaking when we self-tested it. Adam cut holes in the cork and used epoxy glue to fix these problems. Building the Event Depictor took me a long time. First I had to go to a hardware store to pick out materials. Once I had all the wood I cut them using a saw from home and assembled it using screws and wood glue. To make look more aesthetically pleasing I glued edges to the side of the structure.

While Adam and I were building the structures, the rest of the group were working on the team choice elements. Our two final elements were an edited greenscreen video of my character, Garret, and Claire’s character, Claire talking on the phone and the “transformation of characters”, which was body makeup on the characters. We chose the first element because we love to work with technology and videography. For the second element, we all showed a general interest in art, and Claire happened to be really talented at body makeup.

Just as we finished everything it was the day of the competition. We all had to wake up at 8 a.m. on a Saturday and head down to the school for the opening ceremony. It was really cool to see all the different schools at Seycove. At 10:00 later that morning our team had an instant challenge, which is a random task our team has to complete using the materials given to us. I was proud of how we solved the puzzle and we all showed teamwork to complete the task. At 3:00 it was our main performance, and unlike some of my group members I wasn’t that nervous, probably because I didn’t have a lot of lines compared to Claire and Ruby. Before the performance, we checked our structure one last time had a team meeting to pump us all up. As we walked onto the stage I felt proud of all the work we had put into the presentation, especially the podium.

I would recommend you watch our presentation!

I think our presentation went really well, so did the appraisers and crowd, we are moving on to the provincial competition! There are some things that needed to be improved though, and things I would like to add for the next competition. First, I need more lines, I put in a lot of effort into the construction of the performance and it doesn’t really show on stage when I only have two speaking lines… Throughout the project, my team and I have shown great growth and leadership. We all stepped out of our comfort zone to make the presentation awesome, and we ended up learning a lot. Wish me luck at provincials!

Here are our raw scores and feedback from the appraisers.