So we have finally completed the our final Destination Imagination competition as apart of PLP. It’s a sad but also much awaited thing to have finished. After doing DI for 3 years now, it feels right to retire from it, as it’s a very stressful time. I’m going to jump straight into provincials expecting you know my groups challenge. If you want to read more about what DI is, read my last post as it describes DI itself and my team’s challenge,

Anyways, this post is about provincials not my retirement. Between regionals and provincials it didn’t seem like we had too much to change. The main thing we knew we had to edit was our script. This was because in regionals, we didn’t quite finish the whole thing in our allotted time. We also wanted to give one of our characters a few more limes because he didn’t have many in the original script. We ended up cutting a scene and extending another. Another big thing we did was expand on our makeup team choice element. We added way more tattoos to Chad, we added wrinkles to the teacher, and we gave freckles to our “nerdy” character. The structure was remade so that it could be taller and lighter, this was supposed to make it stronger and hold more weight.

During the day of the provincials, our team spent a lot of time fixing and testing all our our props. Having most our props electrical meant lots of things could go wrong. The main problem we identified but thought we fixed was the aux cord connection to our speakers. On the way into the building the event depictor with our speakers in it got dropped and the aux cord came loose. We ended up taping the aux cord to the speakers with electrical tape and it appeared to work very well. We also had to test out our projector a lot just to make sure it was all working.

It was finally time to present. My best description of the whole performance was that: everything that could’ve gone wrong did go wrong. The aux cord connection completely fell out on us right at the start of the performance, the structure broke on the second weight dropped, and we had a menu pop up on the projector. The aux cord turned out to be the biggest problem though. This was because one of our team choice elements relied on having loud audio through the speakers, and it also meant we couldn’t get full points on our event depictor. We got 0 points on the team choice element, as Adam and I made a decision on stage to just skip it because it would make no difference to the story without audio. The only thing that went well was our story, which was always expected. We had a very strong and powerful story about a teenager with social anxiety. All of the appraisers absolutely loved the story and couldn’t praise us enough about it, however it wasn’t enough to overcome the downfall of everything else.

Pretty recently a study came out on DI’s website stating that “Students who participate in DI become better at creative and critical thinking, collaboration and idea generation” (Destination Imagination). Personally for me, I don’t 100% agree or disagree with it. This is because to make this study 100% accurate you would need 2 copies of the exact same kid and see if DI made him any more creative than the other version of him. In the way they have it right now, the study comes from the people who really want to do DI. The people who want to do DI are generally going to be the more creative and out there kids. It’s similar to having a study saying that kids in French immersion kids are smarter than English kids because they get better marks in French. Even though that sounds really extreme it’s a very similar case. French immersion kids are obviously going to get better french marks because:

A: They or Their parents want them to do french

and B: It’s what they are primarily taught.

Thats very similar to DI because DI is aiming to teach you creativity and problem solving skills. So I don’t deny that DI probably does help with teaching creativity and problem solving. I just struggle to completely agree with the study.