Disclaimer

This blog post will consisted of reflections on both the regional tournament and the provincial tournament. However the sections on my provincial tournament will come later on, since it hasn’t happened yet. Now back to the post!

Intro/explanation

Destination Imagination (D.I) is a creative challenge where teams develop solutions to present at a tournament. Challenges inspire students to explore passions, develop talents, and gain new skills. The categories include Technical, Scientific, Fine Arts, Improvisational, Engineering, Service Learning, and Early Learning. While each challenge has a specific educational focus, they are all designed to be diverse, incorporating elements from other fields, for example, the Fine Arts Challenge includes a technical aspect, and the Engineering Challenge features an artistic or storytelling component. Over the course of around 1-2 months we prepare for the tournament inside and (mostly) outside of school. It’s a unique and exiting experience that we are given! Now that that’s out of the way, lets talk about MY challenge. 

 

My Category/Challenge 

I have the scientific challenge “worlds beyond” which was great since it was in my top 2 favourites! 

Rules/criteria 

The description of this category is as follows:

Your team will tell a story about a character who figures out they are not alone on a planet. Show off your science fiction skills with some out-of-this-world technobabble. What will happen when you go beyond the stars?

Criteria:

• Include technobabble in the story.
• Design and build a device and/or effect that demonstrates what the technobabble describes.
• Include a scientific demonstration that shows the science behind why a specific phenomenon of the planet happens and/or exists.
• Create and present two Team Choice Elements that show off the team’s interests, skills, areas of strength, and talents.”

Evidence of learning and how I hope to improve

For the next tournament I hope to come more prepared. I can do this by collaborating and working further with my teammates, and making sure everyone is on the same track. I have some free time on spring break which I can utilize. Something that happened last year is no one (including me) worked on D.I over spring break. This made the week before provincials more stressful than it needed to be and I don’t want that to happen again!

 Now my evidence of learning section will be pretty vague since D.I isn’t over, but it is there!

Creating collaborative note and draft documents for D.I was a huge part of the process and something I found helpful. This included roles for people, things that needed to get done, the script, or general ideas for anything to do with D.I. 

Another thing my group and I worked really hard on is props. This is a tricky part to talk about since some of the props I’m really proud of, and some need some work. I think spring break is a good time to work on some props, as it can be done individually.

New skills I’ve built compared to grade 8 D.I

I feel I’ve grown a lot compared to last years D.I. Now that I’ve had more experience with it I know what to expect. I’ve become much more confident that everything is going to turn out okay, and not stressing out every 5 seconds, which has made my day to day life stress much better. Additionally, I’ve given a large effort to make sure everyone stays on task. Lastly, I’ve become better at problem solving. Before when something didn’t go as planned I didn’t have a plan b, and just freaked out. This year I’ve learned to problem solve and adapt to situations that aren’t always in our favour.

How we created the story

Getting a idea for the story was the easy part, but putting it all together was the harder part. Everyone in my group obviously has different schedules, so to get a time to collaborate and work at the same time was challenging. However, even though the circumstances were not in our favour we decided to be a (bit) more creative by FaceTiming late in the afternoon,therefore  problem solving and making it work even under the unfortunate circumstances.

Conclusion (for now)

This first D.I tournament was such an experience and I can’t wait to see what happens for provincials! Thanks for listening so far, stay tuned for the provincial post add-on!