🌲Hello and welcome back to the forest of learning! This post will focus on DI (destination imagination) which is a tournament that every PLP grade 8 student participated in this year. In DI you are put in to teams of usually about 2-7 students, in my team I had 6. Destination Imagination focuses on encouraging and building student’s creativity, imagination, and teamwork. Their goal is to inspire and equip participants to achieve anything they can imagine in life. Usually, before COVID, we would go in-person and perform a solution to a main challenge in front of appraisers (judges). This year, we had to do it a bit differently; we made a video. So if you want to see the process of solving our challenge, keep reading!🌲

So as I mentioned earlier, we were put into teams. In DI there are 4 different categories which your team can be in: Fine Arts, Engineering, Science, and Technical. For each category the challenges are equally as hard to any other. I was put into the scientific team where we completed the challenge “In Theory” along with these lovely humans (go check out their blogs!) Makenna, Luca, Sylas, Zach, and Sepaus. Together we were a team of 6 ready to tackle our challenge! Together as a team we decided our team name would be “The Simple Solutions”.

And, what exactly is the challenge? Well, in simplicity, our task was to create a documentary film that focuses on breaking/bending a scientific law. In the film we needed to include: 2 team choice elements (a team mates skill/passion for example, sewing), two technical elements to break the law, one technical element to show how the law works in it’s regular state, one expert (someone who has great knowledge of something), one witness (someone who witnesses the event of the law being bent/broken), and 2 or more documentary techniques (ex. Montage, cutaway, voiceover, etc..). Every part of the challenge is worth points, the more points you get, the better! With each aspect, there is a certain amount of points that it can be worth, and it’s up to the appraisers to decide how many points you get.

Another thing: In DI we take it very seriously that absolutely no interference will happen! In the start of DI, we needed to sign a contract stating that your challenge would be 100% crafted and created by your team, and your team only.  We were not allowed to talk about our challenge to anyone outside of our team because our solution had to be 100% made by our team. To insure that our teachers could keep track of us, our team strictly communicated through basecamp. The only time our team would communicate outside of basecamp was when we had zoom calls, which even those we recorded. In basecamp, we chatted in the campfire, but also put all of our work in there as well. Every step of the way, we would always post things in basecamp so our team could access it.

Here is how we used basecamp:  

Our team spent weeks on brainstorming and deciding how we would tackle our challenge. Honestly, it was extremely difficult to think of ways to solve this challenge, we had a lot of things to think about. We probably individually thought of over 100+ ideas on our own before collaborating and narrowing it down to some that we chose: gravity as our scientific law to be bent/broken, my photography as one team choice element, Zach’s piano music as our second team choice element, montage and voiceover as our documentary techniques, and using computer science and statistics as technical elements.

After a LONG time of coming up with ideas, it was time to attempt executing them and prepare for our dress rehearsal where we would try and present our ideas for the challenge to our teachers. After picking the ideas, this is where the teamwork really started blooming. To execute our ideas, we needed to collaborate with our teammates so we could make everything as smooth as possible! We spent time making sure everything was how we envisioned it to be. We spent about two weeks on the script, physical props, technical elements, and team choice elements. 

Here are a couple of tasks we did:
Makenna sewed a wonderful tie for our expert in our story who was played by Sepaus, Sepaus created an awesome 3D animation using blender for our technical elements, I worked on the script, Sylas prepared the filming, Zach picked and recorded a song for our first team choice element, I took some photos for our second team choice element, and Luca helped create props like paper mustaches and a book. We needed to rely on every team member, while also helping each member with their tasks as a collaborative effort.

So what was our story? Our story was about a kid named Zach who loved playing basketball, he would play with his friends everyday at his school gym. But one day they are playing basketball and their ball rolled outside! When they try to look for it, it was nowhere to be found. A friend from their school saw them looking and helped them, he pointed out that he saw the basketball floating in the sky, defying the law of gravity. Our documentary would be about this “event” in which the law of gravity would have been broken.

We also needed to do a couple of other things that would help contribute to our solution. We needed to create tournament data forms, a Q&A video, and do our instant challenge. Unfortunately, the instant challenge is confidential and I cannot tell you about it, but everything else can be explained! Although, the Q&A video is fairly self explanatory; we needed to create a short video that answered some questions about our documentary film. It took us one day to create and write a script as a team, as well as film the video. 

Here is our Q&A video:

The other task we needed to do was creating and writing the tournament data forms. This was a fairly big task which our entire team contributed to. Their were all sorts of questions about each aspect of our documentary film that we had to answer. My personal responsibility was to write about the Creative Process we used throughout creating our solution. I also proof-read most of the forms as well.

After doing these tasks, we had presented our dress rehearsal. From the feedback we were given, we decided to make it more “documentary like” by editing the script to add interviews. We also added more lines for our expert in the story so it would be a little more informative! We basically edited the entire script to get it to be amazing!

We had spent so much time coming up with the ideas, and the day for filming finally came! We spent during lunch and filming until 5 PM after school to make sure it was done. We even spent some time during class as well. Sylas filmed the entire time, we had many obstacles in the way though. When we were filming, the weather was particularly infuriating. Every 10 minutes it would go from sunny with no wind, to cloudy with wind, and then to pouring rain! It was crazy! But luckily we got all of the shots we needed. After filming Sylas also spent the weekend editing our video for it to be ready for Monday for our second “dress rehearsal” where we showed our not-finished finished product to our teacher. She liked it, the major things we needed to fix were small editing problems, but I think it turned out really awesome!

And once we had fixed those, we were DONE! Here was our finished video solution:

Now, after completing our video, on April 11th we found out our scores

drumroll please………

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🥇WE WON! First place baby! 🥇

if I’m being 100% honest, I did not think we would win. But, we did which is super awesome! Our fellow team from Seycove got 2nd (they did amazing!), it was a really close race and all teams in DI this year did amazing. Our team actually won both the instant challenge, and our main challenge which is crazy. All I can say is that every team member worked so hard for this, and I am really proud of my team for being so amazing throughout DI. Way to go Simple Solutions!

This year, DI was generous by giving our teams free hoodies, a pin, and a certificate for participating! We are so lucky!

🌲In reflection, DI was by far the most difficult project I have ever worked on. It was stressful, but extremely satisfying to see our hard work pay off. There are many things I would improve in our video and process of creating it, but I can only look ahead and acknowledge those things to improve and take them into consideration for the future! DI is something I would do again. I can say that I struggle with working in a team, but I think I improved my teamwork skills immensely throughout the course of this experience and I am just grateful that I could be a part of this. Plus- I learned a lot about my team and they are all lovely people! There were many late nights, stressful feelings, and internal screams but it turned out to be super fun. I must say that it is pretty cool that our team won first place, but honestly I would have been happy with any score, I know that I would be proud either way! Although it was tough, I loved this project and I can come away from it with a smile.🌲

As always, thank you for watching me grow in the forest of

🌲learning🌲