So, it’s that time of the year again where DI wraps up and the blog posts start appearing. If your caught up with my blog posts you’ll know our class has been participating in Destination Imagination for three years as well as hosting this years regionals!

This year I actually had quite a lot of fun putting together our final project and working with my team members (Ruby, Claire, Ryan, Adam, Michael). I felt like this year everybody had their hobby’s and talents which they could contribute to the team. For example, Ruby likes to write so she put together the script, and Claire likes art and Special FX so she transformed each member into a character using makeup!

This is our team sign, Ruby put it together using Superimpose!

As I said before I had tons of fun putting together this project! If you didn’t know already, our story is about a teenager who goes through social anxiety at school. I think the reason why I had fun this year was because this project was meaningful and was a very interesting story to create and build upon. Below is a little intro to our teams challenge:

Although we did pretty well at regionals we still had a few things to improve for provincials! After we brainstormed for quite awhile we came up wth a list of things we wanted to change and improve. First of all last time we presented we unfortunately ran out of time, so we decided to shorten and revise the script. We mostly left out the filler conversations and kept the turning events in the story.

Another problem we came across was the screen for the projector didn’t properly project the image. Our issue was that the screen was just a white sheet, so whenever any type of movement occurred or the attachment at the top was uneven the sheet would wrinkle. We came up with a solution to our problem by simply attaching a PVC pipe to the bottom, this stretched out the sheet and essentially just made it even and flatter. Finally we tried to make our structure lighter and taller, which would hopefully make it more stable. To do this all we did was attached more cork to the top and used less epoxy around the outside. While we did this we also learned that using less epoxy is a trick that people who build planes use, apparently using less epoxy on materials actually makes them stronger and more useful.

Unfortunately during the provincials no matter how much we improved a lot still failed. Since we were using quite a lot of electronic devices something bad was bound to happen. Before hand we were testing everything to make sure it was all working, we realized that one of the wires to the radio was a little loose so we tapped over it. During the presentation unfortunately somebody must have tripped over the wire therefor loosening it. When we went to project a scene we had filmed their was no audio. Regardless of what happened I was still very proud of our presentation and team because we had managed to incorporate a very powerful message into our presentation and inform people of the significance of anxiety in ones life. Here’s the critique we received:

Throughout these past few year DI has taught me a great deal of things. I think that the most important thing I learned, and something I use in my everyday life is the skill to evaluate and consider different perspectives. Many times throughout DI I have come to a complete stop with ideas and needed to find a different perspective. Each time I ran out of ideas afterwards I would take a minute and look at the different perspectives. Another contributor to training my mind to do these things was the instant challenges. These challenges were focused around your teams effort to problem solve under pressure. Each challenge we were faced with we brainstormed and thoroughly looked at all the options and perspectives. A study also showed the many other benefits DI can give you:

Overall DI has taught me quite a few skills that I can not only use in school and projects but also in my everyday life!