Destination Imagination

One Last Time…

Sam

Finally.

We have finished.

DI is over. All the hard work and stress that went into that project has dissipated. Now that we’ve done that we can do pretty much anything.

I guess that now I’m writing in a blog post I’ll tell you what I think we’ve learned throughout our DI experiences:

Basically, every year we’ve been through a learning cycle that goes as follows:

Recognize

As every year in DI we are given challenges that typically in groups of 5 or six other PLP 10 students. This year, as I explained in my other DI post for regionals, I was with Spencer, Izzy, Kate, Calum, and Isobel in the Maze Craze Challenge.

My Old Friend DI, Back Again

Back to our first step, recognizing. I think that this is definitely an important step, and that’s because this is when you learn all about your challenge, the main idea, it’s do’s and don’ts, and all its variables. It’s an important step to take because it sets you up for the long road ahead. There are also a lot of details in this step that you have to make sure you know for the future.

Recognize

My opinion on this step is that in the three years we’ve done DI, we have grown a lot in this area.  We all take time to read over what our challenge is, and begin planning ot our ideas. After doing this since grade 8, it’s gotten a lot easier since we know the drill and everything is easier to understand. What I mean is, after doing these challenges for three years, we have experience that helps us with our current challenge. Even through we might get different challenges for different years, the base of how DI works is still the same, and so we can carry over our strategies and techniques from past years, which I think we did effectively.

Onto the next step.

Imagine

In this step we thought of what our performance would actually look like. We would brainstorm all the ways we can combine a challenge with multiple aspects with an entertaining story. This step was probably the most important because we had to make sure we hadn’t missed anything from the first step, and that it made sense with our story. All the little things like the object removal, team choice elements, and the maze traveler had to integrate seamlessly into our performance.

For this step, our team didn’t have too much trouble. I think that as a group we did really well thinking of ideas, as we came up with a few right off the bat. We quickly narrowed our ideas down by process of elimination to two main ideas, a space mission, where the maze traveler is a mars rover, or a police mission, where the maze traveler is a bomb defusing rover. I think this step is really important. It is when you combine the details of the challenge with what your team wants those details to look like in person. It takes a lot of thinking because pretty much everything in the story has to represents something from the challenge.

Initiate and Collaborate

In this step, over the three years we’ve done it, is when we get to the fun part. At this point, we have our script written, props we need are in a list, and we just have to get all the materials and put everything together. We then work as a team and prepare our props, costumes, backgrounds and more to be ready for performance day. This step is hands-on, its do whatever needs to be done so we can move onto the next problem. It is supposed to be done in advance to the performance day, so we have time to practice. But it doesnt always work out that way…

Initiate

In my DI career, I have to say that us PLP’ers are good at doing this step really quickly. That’s because we pretty much do all the work the week leading up to DI day, when we’ve had months to do this step. I don’t know what it is, but we always think we’ve got it under control, and then DI is in 6 days and we all scramble to get everything ready in time. Every year for the most part this happens, and only this year was I really aware of it. It is honestly just teenage procrastination, and its effects kick in right at around this time. We say, ah, just do it next week, and then when doomsday looms on the horizon, only then do we realize our lethal mistake, and it’s too late.

Thankfully though, we usually manage to complete all that needs to be done. But only on rare occasion we actually have time to practice with everything ready. This year, this was our case for both regionals and provincials. We had everything ready the day before and then our first full practice was the real live performance…

But, over time this has gotten better. Barely.

Assess

If we did this step correctly, we would be pretty much ready for our presentation. We would look back at what we have completed and make sure its what we need to complete our challenge. We would fill out our forms, which are vital, and conduct a dress rehearsal to get a feel for how everything works. Then we’d plan ahead for who will take what to the school where the event is hosted. And then we’d wait for the day to come

But, to be totally honest, I’ve never done this step this way at all.

Realistically, we had been so behind that we would/have to pretty much go from Initiate and Collaborate straight to Evalute and Celebrate. Our dress rehearsals in front of the class were always horrible, but they also doubled as a bucket of cold water in the face. It showed us we had to get our heads in the game. Our forms would be assigned to one unfortunate soul in our group, while the rest of us “worked on other stuff.” We’d be finishing all our props and backgrounds at this time, which were supposed to be done earlier, and not sleeping at night from stress. Then in the last 10 minutes of class on the Friday before the DI day, we’d assign the gear to different people and figure out how to get to this random school in Surrey.

And if you haven’t noticed already, I’ve been describing my teams adventures through this step. But SOMEHOW, we’d pull it together, and this time for Provincials, we actually were sort of ready.

Now, prepare yourself, it’s time for:

Evaluate and Celebrate

In this final step, we’d complete our main challenge and instant challenge, and have burned all our props and costumes. Just kidding, we didn’t burn anything. Yet. But we would have received our scores, and probably disagreed with them.

But let me tell you about our experience and our results.

Raw scores for DI Provincials

 

Once we got to location, my team and I ran through our script a few times, and halfheartedly ran through an entire performance together. This time, we had a few things that  we re-thought. For example, we started our rover over from scratch, which me and Calum tag teamed to finish off over spring break.

The new and improved rover

 

The rover managed to work fine save for a increasingly wobbly wheel, but like every time, it has to break halfway through the performance.

Izzy and Spencer managed to completely recreate our failed prop transformation, and this time it worked really well. It was a small balloon with remote controlled lights inside of it, and that small balloon was inside an even larger balloon that would pop, signifying a bomb explosion. There also was an explosion sound effect. It worked really well, so props to you guys.

For our team choice element, we had our own music, and this time we decided to play it live. Isobel was the trumpeteer, and it sounded really good. She played some soft/sad music once Calum died and I was left alone

And of course, Kate worked on her French speaking. This was for her villian character, and her and Izzy go back and forth about not speaking french. We did this to add to our characters to make them more diverse and interesting.

Below is our presentation, filmed by the one and only, Simon Devisser.

Results

Well, we did ok. Not as good as I thought we would but we still got 1st place, which is sweet. The rover stopped working halfway through, but I think that other than that, everything went as planned. We also got first in our instant challenge, which is awesome. Information regarding the instant challenge is highly classified and cannot be discussed at this time. Overall I’m really happy with how we did, we left DI behind, and we had a lot of fun in the process.

Overall, would I say DI has helped me as a learner?

Reluctantly, yeah I think I would. DI has probably done more for me than I know it, and its taught me a lot about time management and teamwork. It also teaches us how to use our creativity and problem solving skills to work our way around crazy challenges, and to shine a little of our own interests into what we create. All of this I think is a major part of everyone’s lives for getting jobs and careers.

But no matter what I say, and if you agree or disagree with me, it’s been “scientifically proven” that DI helps kids of all ages learn in different ways. A man by the name of Dr. Mark Runco conducted a survey on students who participated in DI, and students who didn’t. This is what he found:

Destination Imagination students were found to be:

  • More engaged and imaginative when completing given tasks
  • More creative than non-DI participants
  • More self-confident and tenacious
  • Able to elaborate on and generate more ideas than non-DI participants
  • Great collaborators—86% of DI students agree that their teamwork skills improved within 1-2 years of participation
  • More inquisitive—92% of DI students agree that solutions to problems are often improved by considering a variety of perspectives

Whether or not this is true is up for debate, but I would definitely say that it did help us a little. I’m just hoping there’s not some form of DI-PTSD that we will all develop where we picture crazy cow hats and large groups of crazy little children running through a school every time we sleep…

To conclude this long post, I’d like to say that DI has been an interesting experience. Ive worked with a bunch of different people, and every year has been completely different. I think that if I were to take away one thing from DI, it would be that there are thousands of ways to solve a problem, and that I should go with what i think is best and complete that challenge the best I can. I should work hard and get everything ready for my big day, and then when that day comes, show everyone all the hard work I’ve done and blow them all away. I think that most of DI’s principles carry over to life in general. There are always going to be problems, some are easy, some are hard, but I have to just keep going and do one thing at a time.

Wow, that was deep. I think now is the time where I sign off.

 

See you

My Old Friend DI, Back Again

Sam

Well, we since we’ve done it for the past two years, we might as well do it again and make it three in a row.

Yes, I’m talking about DI. Or Destination Imagination, if you must. If you want to you can click here to read my other DI posts. But read this one since I spent a lot of time writing it…

This year, for the first time we were actually competing against other teams from Seycove, the grade 9 PLP class, since we are both in the senior level. As usual in DI, there are the same challenge topics, but not the same actual challenges. This year, I was put into the Technical Challenge: Maze Craze.  Click here to see what all the other challenges were.

This short video explains how our challenge works:

 

So, yeah. We had a lot to do.

We were given our challenge and groups back in the late fall, sometime before christmas. My group consisted of me, Spencer, Izzy, Kate, Isobel and Calum. I was quite happy with our group.

First off, we started brainstorming ideas. This was in the form of writing them down on small idea tiles, and then arranging them as a group based on their topic. Those topics could be things that were ideas for the story, the Maze Traveler, or our Team Choice Elements. We worked out a lot of different ideas, and arranged them all to look like below:

Oh yeah, I mentioned Team Choice elements earlier, and they are something extra that we add to our performance to make it more personalized. Here is more information about them:

These team choice elements would be 15% of our overall score, and so we needed them to be good quality. But for some reason, every year in our groups, we never really go above and beyond with these TCE. I dont know why. Anyways, back to the creative process.

The next step was deciding on a story, and then writing the script. We looked over our idea squares, and decided on a police type story. Then we needed to decide on what parts of the challenge needed to be in our story, and how we would incorporate them in to make it interesting. Here is an example of a chart we made about the maze traveler, in our planning stage:

We had one of these charts for every deliverable of our challenge. The maze traveler would be a bomb-seeking/defusing rover, and would be coded to each of the 8 random mazes we were given, so we would follow it through the maze. The aim was that we would get a lot of points for coding and building our own traveler, and not just buy an RC car from Wal-mart.

We then began working out the more visual parts of the presentation, like who is going to be who. We decided on the following characters:

  • Spencer: An old man named Rob who is telling the story
  • Sam: The young version of Rob when he was actually experiencing the story
  • Calum: Rob’s police partner and childhood best friend, named Thomas
  • Izzy: An Evil Villian
  • Kate: A French Evil Villian
  • Isobel: Police Captain

The Story:

The context for our story was a flashback. Spencer was the older version but also present day version of me, and he is at a family reunion 50 years after the story happened. In the story, he was a police officer on the bomb squad, and him and his partner Thomas were dispatch on  their first mission on their first day of the force, straight out of the academy. They were given their gear by the Police Captain, Isobel, and were sent off to an old apartment building. Rob and thomas then entered the building, which was the maze, and sent in the bomb rover. Rob and thomas followed it through the maze and past the two event squares.

Event Squares:

In the 16×16 foot maze, two of the 16 4×4 squares were set apart as event squares. The maze and the location of the event squares would differ based on the random maze we pick two minutes before the performance starts. This makes things a little difficult. But not to worry, it’s not too bad.

But on the event squares, two things had to happen.

On one event square, a object removal had to happen. The maze traveler had to remove some object from the maze, in any way shape or form.

And on the other event square, a prop transformation and to occur. This could be anything that could be seen from 25 feet away, and had to be an obvious change.

Our group could choose the order of the event squares for the performance. But, enough talk, back to…

The Story

The first Event Square was object removal, and Rob and Thomas got the rover to push a paper-mâché bomb out of the maze. Then they advanced through the maze until they came across the second event square. And then things happened. The prop transformation was on another paper mâché bomb, with a strip of LED lights taped all around it. The LED lights go off, and BOOOM goes a bomb.

But, instead of me telling you what happened next, watch the video of our actual performance here.

Results

Well, if I can say one thing, our performance didnt go as planned. I mean, for the most part it did but the maze traveler didnt even move. Unless we kicked it. Which is what we ended up having to do. This was our scoresheet. It tells you the maximum points for each topic of our performance, and then the amount of points we were actually given.

An aspect that the judges really liked was our backdrop. This wasn’t for points, but they said they really like how it was built. That’s because we built it to look like a large storybook. Me and spencer took a trip to Rona and bought two sheets of thin ish plywood, cut them in half, and then screwed them together with hinges to make an eight page book. This was because Spencer was telling a story, and it matched that theme perfectly.

An aspect of our performance that didn’t go so well were our team choice elements. We didn’t receive mush points for the music one because it was played extremely quietly, and our lets just say our french speaking character wasn’t exactly a big hit. We need to rethink those.

And also, our object transformation wasn’t executed properly and so we were scored pretty low on that as well. The lights were supposed to become red via a remote that changes the colours of the LED strip, but the remote broke before the performance…

Lets move on…

 

Reflection Time!

I think that even though our rover failed completely, and we didnt get that much points for… anything else… we did really well. We had to do some quick thinking while presenting since  our script required an actual working rover. We worked well as a team and go through our performance with our dignity still intact, for the most part. The actual time we spent working on the project was pretty smooth, and it was fun. Just like every year, we pretty much leave everything until the last week before the tournament, and end up getting really rushed. But I feel we really worked hard and it paid off. I really do think we have a great start to a really good performance, which we INTENTIONALLY didn’t do for regionals and saved for provincials…

I think that we need to definitely work on the rover, thats just a given. But I also think that we can think up some pretty awesome team choice elements if we put our minds to it, since we are a pretty talented group of people. We definitely have a lot more to work on. Overall, I think we did quite well and Im sort of looking forward to provincials since i think we can do extremely well with a bit more practice.

And if the rover works.

*cough, cough, CALUM, cough…*

That’s all folks,

See you

Our Destination Was First Place…

Sam

Hello,

Welcome back to another post on the educational competition we participated in called Destination Imagination. We participated in the first rounds on February 27th called Regionals. My post on regionals is here. After that, we had a few weeks to revise our whole projects to get ready for the Provincial tournament which happened on April 8th.  To make our project better we needed to do a few things. First, we needed to reconstruct our balsa wood structures since they broke in the regional tournament. We redid our designs so they would be a little stronger, and then weighed them correctly. We also needed on more Team Choice Element, other than the animation I made. Our element was whenever Michael spoke as the narrator, he spoke in rhyme. Those were the two major improvements on our presentation.

Now onto our actual performance. We did pretty good overall, a lot better than our first try in regionals. Our structures held a total of 90 pounds and probably more, but we were worried about not having enough time to finish our performance since we only had 8 minutes. Putting the weights on took a long time. Here’s a short clip of us putting on the weights:

Testing the structures.

We did finish in time, which was good since in regionals we didn’t. I liked our story and I feel like we weren’t given enough points for it.

Overall the day at Destination Imagination was fun, I liked performing and redeeming ourselves even if we got fourth. Out of four. Anyways it was fun. The one thing I didn’t like that much was the waiting. Lots of it we were just sitting and talking since it was raining outside. As you can see in this picture:

We were waiting for our turn to present. The whole day was fun, and I enjoyed presenting all the hard work we put into this project.

Destination Imagination: Year Two

Sam

Hello,

Over the past month and a half the grade 8’s and 9’s of PLP have been working on a big project, called Destination Imagination. It’s a big organization that runs an educational competition every year. In our PLP 9 class, we were split into groups to complete different challenges and work as individual teams, but still represent Seycove all together.
I was in a group with Spencer, Adam, Lucas, and Michael. We did the engineering challenge. The other challenges were technical, fine arts, community outreach, improv, and science. In our challenge, we needed to create two or more freestanding structures made from only balsa wood and glue. They also need to be able to hold weight on top, and it has to be incorporated into a story as well.
We started by planning out what our story would be and the designs of our wood structures.

We also started planning the story by choosing the two nations that have to come together to solve an international issue. The international issue in our story was global warming, drew we showed that with a ruined city as our background.

We chose 4 that would start out, but then two nations would back out, and Canada and the USA would be left. They would work together to build a space shuttle to send the rest of humanity to a distant planet called Gargantuan, which is similar to earth.

To start off the actual construction of our wood structures, we chose our designs. One was a rocket shape, and the other was the launch pad stand that held the rocket before takeoff.

These were the almost-completed versions of our balsa wood structures.
We also needed to build all our props and backgrounds. We started with drawing our backgrounds for each scene on paper, one was a wrecked city, one was a diagram of the Milky Way galaxy and the one Gargantuan is in, one is a construction site, and the last one blank because we wanted to project an animation onto it. We then built a stand for our backgrounds, with chairs, hockey sticks and a piece of bamboo. The backgrounds were taped onto the bamboo in a flip chart style. It did not look very good. Also during this time we were working on our script, the story of our play, the balsa wood structures and other props like boxes and costumes.

We pulled everything together just in time for a dress rehearsal six days before the actual event, and nothing looked that nice. We didn’t have the entire script at its best, the background stand looked like we found the stuff on the street, and we barely had any costumes. But after the dress rehearsal we worked really hard and managed to pull it off at the actual event really well.
To make it better, we tore down the old background stand and pasted all the backgrounds to cardboard (there is a photo above), which kept the paper from getting wrinkled, and we replaced the stand with 3 music stands which looked a lot cleaner.

I also started doing our animation. It was one of our team choice elements, which means it is something that shines and shows something that we are interested in. The animation was something I drew, and it was a slideshow format.

These were 3 slides from the animation. I drew the inside of the cockpit, and then replaced the view through the window for each slide. It was around twenty-six slides and showed the space shuttle launch from earth and land on Gargantuan four years later. It was fun to draw but took a long time.

On Friday, the day before the tournament, we all got together and practiced our performance a bunch of times until we were ready for the next big day.
After the day was over, we placed 5th out of 5, but still get to move on to provincials. We had a great story and props, but the balsa wood structures didn’t hold any weight because we had take 20 grams off them when we got there unexpectedly so they got really weak and broke before we could put weight on them.

We lost a lot of points
The day of the tournament was fun, we got to see our friends do their performances, played sports outside while waiting, and explored the big school where it was hosted.
Overall the creative process was awesome, especially to see the parts and pieces of our big project come together, and the actual tournament day was fun but really long.

Destination Imagination

Sam

Hi!

Welcome to another blog post by me. So, in the beginning we were given a challenge. We needed to complete the challenge. We built props and costumes. Then we went to a tournament.

The tournament was on Saturday February 27th. Yeah, Saturday. So in the course of a month and a bit, we worked on our projects.

Building Our tree

Above is a picture of our tree, almost finished.

There was about five groups in our grade, I think. My group needed to demonstrate how a living organism camouflaged in the wild. We decided to make our project around how owls blend in with trees. We also needed to make a story with a big plot twist.

Our story went a little like this:
A young owl was very curious about what he could do, and he wanted to become greater. He heard about this Wise Old Chameleon who could teach him the art of camouflage, so he went to find him. But what the little owl didn’t know, was that he was moulting!!! Some of his feathers were now on the forest floor.
A dangerous hunter found those feathers, realized it was a western screech owl, and decided to capture it to sell on the black market. He was following the trail of feathers to the little owl. Meanwhile, the owl made it to the Wise old Chameleons tree. He knocked on the tree, and begged the Wise Old Chameleon to teach him the art of camouflage. He agreed, and the pay started right away. Since the owl was with the Chameleon, the hunter couldn’t find the owl.
Once the owl was done, he decided to head home to show his friends. The hunter caught up with the owl, and right before he was caught, the owl remembered his training, and dove into a tree to camouflage. The hunter couldn’t find him, so the hunter headed home, and so did the owl.

That was our presentation. I was the owl, Claire was the hunter/chameleon, and Ryan was the narrator. I think that our presentation went well, and we scored well. We are moving on to the next round: Provincials! We definitely needed to work hard on this, and we did lots of work after school on some days.
We also did an instant challenge which is a challenge we don’t know at all, and we receive a smaller challenge that we need to complete in a certain. time. We did well on that, but we didn’t place first.

For Provincials, I would say I’m one third excited, one third nervous, and one third of me doesn’t want to go. Overall, we did good, and had some fun. Below is a picture of the Seycove grade 8 and 10 teams with our ribbons, at the end of the day.

The End of a Great Day