One of the more stressful projects we have done this year is Destination Imagination. Both grade 8s and 9s complete in this competition every year. Let me explain a little more about this huge tournament that happens globally each year. DI is a series of challenges that school or other groups can apply to complete in. Each group must have less than 8 people and be able to create a project to help solve the given challenge. There are 5 categories for challenges that each require a specific type of skill. For example, I was put on the Fine Arts team, because I enjoy art and design. Our challenge was to create a play that would show the effects that would happen if a singular colour was to disappear. In our play we had to have a vanishing act which was possible with one of the modern theatre methods used today. My group was very fortunate because we had a variety of people with a variety of skills. The selected colour we chose was yellow. The only bad part was that we didn’t think about how colours mix and how yellow is a primary colour. This set us back quite a bit because we had to change all the other affected colours of the rainbow too, while keeping it looking like magic. We chose to use lighting technical effects and create a rainbow model with colour changing LED light strips. For the story and play piece, we wanted to be creative and base it off of Greek Mythology because we had some prior knowledge. Each colour was given a goddess but then the goddess of white and shades comes in and steals the yellow gem, which controls all of the colour yellow. This is when we turn of the yellow bow of the rainbow because it takes out all the colour. The rainbow goddess family later convinces the white goddess to return it and she becomes the controller of weather. We worked really hard on the story piece which scored us a lot of points when we went to the DI regionals. The only piece that didn’t work was the rainbow. Unfortunately for us, the light up rainbow (which we hand-made) decided not to turn on. This lost us a few points but we still managed to make it in 3rd place out of 8 teams. Overall, DI was a great experience of hard work, team work and skill building and I hope we place even higher in provincials.

Click here to see a timelapse we made when we constructed the rainbow.

Photos from the actual presentation will appear here soon when I get them from my family. 🙂