The Final Destination (for now)

Hello readers and welcome to another blog post! This post is going to be detailing our provincial Destination Imagination tournament. I’ve already explained DI to you guys before, but in case you are new here or you somehow missed my previous post, I’ll explain it to you again. If you aren’t satisfied with this explanation or would like to view our previous performance, click on this link to view my post on the regional Destination Imagination tournament.

The official logo⬆️

Destination Imagination, (DI) is a educational competition where kids from schools and communities work on a solution to a challenge. Each group has to come up with their own unique ideas for their problems. There were several different challenges this year. They were: Scientific, Fine Arts, Improvisational, Engineering and Technical. My group, which consisted of Lucy, Izzy and Paisley, were chosen to take on the Fine Arts challenge.

Each challenge has its own unique twist and ours was no exception. For the Fine arts challenge (which was labeled “change of tune”), we had to create a musical. And not just any musical. This musical was required to have a change of plans and have two acts. In each act there had to be at least one song. There also had to be a set change. Click the link to watch the video!

As if it wasn’t hard enough, we had to write and edit the whole script by ourselves. To summarize, we had to write a musical with different character, songs, different acts, a change of plans, etc… and then perform it in front of judges at a competition where every team from around our area presents their solution to their challenge.

Our group had scraped together a decent play for our regional tournament. It went something like this: We had three characters who were stuck on a desert island in the middle of the pacific. It was two sisters and some random dude. Izzy and paisley were the sisters, I was the random dude and Lucy was a narrator. The characters were faced with the prospect of staying on the desert island forever but suddenly Izzy’s character found a boat which saved them. The two songs we performed were a cover of Stay by Rihanna and a cover of I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor.

We thought our play was alright, but after watching other groups perform, we knew that we had to improve our performance.

Over the course of the next month before provincials, we drastically changed our play. The first huge step was changing character roles. We agreed as a group that it would be much more beneficial if Lucy and I switched roles. I thought this was a good change because she played my part better than I did and having me at narrator also worked out.

Another huge step was adding an extra scene into our play. The added scene was when Izzy’s character finds the boat. In the old play, we had her just mentioning that she got it from an old man but in the improved version, we added a scene where she talks to the old man (played by yours truly) and then gets the boat. I felt as though this new scene added much more to the play and helped the viewers understand it more. We also changed a few lines to make them fit our characters a little bit more.

With all these changes and also because of spring break, we didn’t really get a lot of time to practice. We had one dress rehearsal a few days before the tournament and that was it. For the week before, I think our group met after school to work 4 day out of 5. We showed some really good effort and determination to finish our props and our script.

Before we knew it, it was the day for provincials already. We had to load all of our materials into a van and drive them out to a school in Surrey. It had the prospect to be a long day.

Another thing with that day is that it was Masters Saturday. For those of you that don’t know me well, I love golf and play it nearly every day. It just so happened that the biggest golf tournament of the year was going down on the exact date of DI. Luckily, I found a way to watch on my iPad so I had that problem solved. Back to DI. We had our presentation at 11:30 and our instant challenge at 3:15.

For those of you whose were wondering, instant challenges are a huge point of DI. They are sort of like mini challenges in which you have to complete a task in order to get points. There are three types of instant challenge, task-based, performance-based or a combination of the two. During these challenges, you get points for teamwork, creativity and how well you complete the challenge.

We had to be at the school at 8 am for a opening ceremony where we parade into the gym and we had to stay and wait for the results until 5 pm. We spent most of the morning preparing for our main challenge. Suddenly, we were moving our props onto the stage and we were starting!

It’s hard to describe what it was like. We presented our play in a theatre in front of judges and our peers. I thought it went pretty well. I missed a few cues and a few group members missed some of their lines but it definitely could have gone worse.

Click this⬇️

to check out our performance!!

Some things that didn’t exactly go as planned was that we ran out of time before we could finish our play and ultimately it came down to us not being able to practice using a projector enough.

I’m really proud of my group and our play and I really think we worked well as a team in the end. It was lots of fun.

We were then waiting around until our instant challenge. I kept myself entertained by watching the !asters and by also watching fellow schoolmates performances. After waiting around a bit, we had to do our instant challenge.

It was a very frustrating experience. We couldn’t figure out a solution and ended up running out of time before we could do anything. But I guess there’s always next year!!

We ended up coming in sixth place, which isn’t that bad for the entire province!

I think I learned a lot from my Destination Imagination experience. It taught me how to work as a team member and how to be efficient with my work. It was a huge challenge to figure out a solution to the problem, but in the end it was a good journey.

DI teaches important life skills such as teamwork, creativity and inquisitive. It’s even scientifically proven that kids who have done Destination Imagination have gone on to have better life skills. Read more about that here. I really felt as though it was a unique and different way to do work.

Proven Results

I think that, if given the choice, I would maybe do it again. It’ll be interesting to see what I can do next year for DI.

Well readers, I hope you’ve enjoyed this blog post about my DI experience.

Until next time,

Niklas