We’ve “successfully” completed round 1 of D.I! Which you might be wondering what exactly is D.I? Destination Imagination otherwise known as D.I “is a volunteer-led, educational non-profit organization that teaches 21st century skills and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) principles to kindergarten through university level students through creative and collaborative problem solving challenges.” And this year the regional championships was hosted here at our very own Seycove Secondary! Which made it way easier as we didn’t have to drag all our stuff out to surrey or something…

Along with the main challenges which I’ll explain in a bit… there is also an instant challenge that you must complete with your group. Which an instant challenge is basically when you have know idea what the challenge is and it can be performance based, task based, or a combination of the two. You are usually given a few supplies and there is always a time limit, so you have to do some quick thinking, and improv. For the one we did at DI this year my group worked super good together and we actually ended getting first in our catergory!!!

D.I 2018 challenges that we got to chose out of were, the technical challenge which was maze craze, the sciencetific challenge unlikely attraction, the engineering challenge drop zone, the fine arts challenge change of tune, and finally the improvisational challenge treasure. I’m not going to go into detail about any of the challenges except for the one that my group and I took on. But you can read more about the rest on the website🙂

I did the fine arts challenge change of tune! The criteria for this challenge was to create and present a musical that includes a change in plans, include music and lyrics that enhance the storytelling, create and present a spectacle as part of the musical design and integrate a set change into the musical, create and present two Team Choice Elements that show off the team’s interests, skills, areas of strength, and talents.

Before even beginning  to find the solution to our challenge we would have completely memorize our challenge over the winter break. To sum up the 12 pages we were to read, many, many times, we had to look at the central challenge, which includes the musical, the music and lyrics the spectacle, and the set change. Then we had to look at the team choice elements and finally the scoring. After study our whole challenge we had to create keynote with our group and present it explaining our challenge to everyone else.

In my group there is Izzy, Nik, and Lucy, and we’ve been working together for quite a few months now. Over the time we’ve worked together there have been some bumps and struggles within our group as far as working together but now I feel like we’ve settled our differences and we work pretty good together.

We began brainstorming ideas as for what our musical could look like, and after throwing ideas around here and there we finally had a plan, which we later cleaned up, but we had a basic idea. We put Lucy as our narrator, and Nik, Izzy and I had roles as people stuck on a deserted island. Izzy (who we named Evie) would go out to get some fish, and after being gone awhile Nik (Domic) and I (Sophia) begin to get worried, which is where we have our first song. With this song we were going to create the music, but soon decided to write unit to the tune of a song we already know. I wrote this song and it is to the tune of Stay by Rihanna.

That’s our final draft which we preformed^ but we also had the one that we were going to create our own music too which we didn’t end up using as we had didn’t have a melody prepared to go with it and we ended up liking our revised one we preformed better:)

After our first song we go to bed and that’s the end of act one, which Lucy makes clear, we then have our set change which is when Evie shows up in a boat that she found, and we all get on. That then starts our second song that we all contributed to the writing of it, which it is to the tune of I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor.

That wraps up the musical and Lucy has a finishing few lines. You can watch our musical if you to!

Overall this is my first time doing DI and I think my group and I definitely know how we could improve our performance for round 2 of DI coming up April 7th! It wasn’t that creative and we already have a few ideas on how we can make it longer and better. I was surprised on how quickly the day went by, and since our performance was one of the latest as it was at 2 I thought it would be a long wait building up but at 8 when we arrived I blinked and we were already performing! The appraisers gave us our raw scores and a few notes on things they enjoyed!

I’m excited to improve our musical, and I think for our first time we didn’t do too bad! You’ll definitely be seeing a DI round 2 blog post soon… hope you learned something new about DI, until next time…..

-Paisley