Hey everyone! My Destination Imagination team just finished its provincial competition. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, hit the link below.
So as I was saying, we just finished competing in DI provincials. However, there where a few challenges with my team’s participation. First of all, we where missing two of our four teammates, and second, one of those team mates was me. This was bad because I played one of the main characters in the project: “Roberto, The Ghost Of Music Past!” but despite these challenges, the show went on and it provided us with an opportunity to create our own additional “challenge” by finding ways to compensate for my and Sofia’s (my other missing teammate) absence.
First, my group and I brainstormed a number of ideas that would solve this problem of our absence, such as; make a robot to replace me, project a prerecorded version of me on the wall at the back, as well as a few other ideas that don’t really warrant mention.
In the end, we went with simpler is better and Hannah (the in attendance teammate) played me and her original character.
At first glance you might think this is crazy because Hannah and I were supposed to be on stage at the same time, however, we addressed this issue by making Hannah two characters at the same time. We did this by using make-up and putting a line down the middle of her face and then sewing one half of each of our costumes together, giving her a split personality.
Apparently the day went well despite me and Sofia’s absence and the team came in second.
As for me, well, I was busy with another very important competition: my cadet corps’ marksmanship team’s participation in the 2018 Provincial Cadet Marksmanship competition. During this competition, sixty-five air, army and sea cadets from 12 B.C. communities competed taking aim at paper targets with a Daisy 853C air rifle. Each team has to have at least two junior cadets under the age of 15. The cadet marksmanship program is patterned on Olympic-style competitive shooting, and several Canadian Olympians got their start through the cadet program, including Pat Vamplew (left) and Mike Ashcroft (right).
This was the first time in my Corps’ history that its marksmanship team qualified for provincials and this year it was held in Victoria. It was a three day long competition (Friday-Sunday) and involved two different modes of shooting, Prone and standing.
My team met at the North Vancouver Armoury, J.P.Fell Armoury, and boarded a bus that then had a few stops along the way to pick up other lower mainland cadets. Two of the cadets we picked up in Richmond were my buddies from Fullbore, which is a marksmanship program in Ottawa that we all attended last summer. We arrived to the Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt (CFB Esquimalt) in west of Victoria. This base was established as a military installation by the Royal Navy in 1855 and is home to the Canadian Navy Maritime Forces Pacific (MARPAC). We arrived around 19:00 (7pm) so we spent the night getting settled.
On the second day we started the competition. I shot/competed three times that day, once at 10:00 (10am), 12:00 (noon) and 13:00 (1pm). These where all twenty shot relays all in prone (which means we shot laying on the ground). Because we finished so early that day, around 14:00 (2pm), my team decided to look around downtown Victoria, specifically China Town.
The third and final day consisted of one twenty round relay and one ten round relay both in standing position. This was challenging for me as I only recently learned how to shot in this position. Because we had to get back to Vancouver, the awards ceremony was held immediately after the last relay. My team placed tenth, which was not bad for our very first provincial competition.
That next day (Monday), I learned out that my DI team had come in second in provincials. I was pretty proud of us because I truly feel that we worked hard to accomplish our ranking. The areas in which we lost points was mostly in the area of sets, specifically, our set change. I feel like we could have come-up with a more elaborate/impressive way to manipulate the set. For example, our original plan was to have the entire stage spin, but we could not work out the mechanical logistics in time. Even though we came second I think that this, like all the other destination imagination events, as a learning experience.
Destination Imagination has really helped me with both my critical problem solving skills as well as improve my creativity. Thats because DI is designed to be a competition in which you score points for the creative ways you solve the problems that are given to you. You also learn some more specific skills like carpentry (for set building) and budgeting (to keep total costs under $200). In fact, in 2014 a Professor of Educational Psychology by the name of Dr. Mark Runco led a study on the engagement and creative attitudes among students who participated in destination imagination and those who didn’t. The statistically significant results showed that DI students where;
-More engaged
-More creative
-Able to elaborate on, and generate, more ideas
-Better collaborators
-More inquisitive
Based on my experiences with DI over the years, I would agree with these statements and I can’t wait for the next time we participate in the DI program.