Month: March 2024
Let’s get Goghing!
So that time has come where Destination Imagination will strike fear into the hearts of those terrified of performing infront of others (like myself). So who’s nervous?
If you’ve been reading my blogs for a while, a while being 2 whole years, wow 2 years that’s terrifying to think of anyway long time readers would know what destination imagination is, but I’ll go over a recap for those of you who need to learn. DI, or destination imagination, is a worldwide organization that hosts annual events for children of all age groups to come together with friends and learn skills that can be actually used and applied in the real world, such as creative or innovative thinking (shout out to the crazy ones). I could go on explaining what this event is but the lovely team at DI have made a video explaining what exactly goes down so here it is.
Now in DI there are different categories for each team to perform in, this year our options were Scientific, Engineering, Technical and finally my choice Fine Arts. I’m going to try to explain the Fine Arts challenge but if you interested in finding out about any of the other challenges, or really just anything DI related, I recommend you visit their website right here.
So my challenge is Fine Arts, the name of the challenge “In Motion” we were tasked to make a performance based around three things a piece of visual art, a kinetic art piece and a piece of reimagined art. These things are a piece of artwork that’s publicly known (visual art), a piece of art that has some form of movement via a mechanism (kinetic art) and the original visual art being transformed into one of these new art forms, Dance, Illusion, Puppetry, Music, Pantomime or a Spoken Word Poem. So in short we had to make a story based around these three things, but wait there’s more we had to include 2 extra things known as team choice elements. Essentially these are things that make our performance unique and different to others. Team choice elements can be anything decided by your team that everyone relates too. But in order to choose team choice elements, we needed a team. My group consisted of 3 wonderful grade 9’s called Charlie, Aiya and Melissa, but there was also my grade 10 buddy Kira (you can click on their names to see their blogs). Now I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to disclose what my team did for these exactly because we don’t want anyone stealing our ideas (that’s right DI is still not over) but I can assure you we came up with a solution we all agreed on. Now this may all seem like a lot, but I haven’t even gotten into any of the specifics yet, so if your interested you can find the document of rules on the DI website.
So now we knew what we had to do and just had to get down to it. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot I can say about the process of coming up with our solution, but what I can tell you is that it was stressful, I may have lost time from my lifespan, it was difficult and finally [suspenful pause] my team chose the art piece a Starry Night.
With this choice we came up with the name “The Gogh Getters”. Here is my groups version made by Aiya, along with some other photos of the creation process.
Now after I wrote the script and my group working hard to get everything done in the limited class time given and hours after school it was time, the week of DI had come. But here is the twist. The week before my lovely mother had gotten sick. I tried my best to keep my distance but on Tuesday I felt something going on with my throat, I immediately let my group know but I still hoped it was just a one day thing. But when I woke up the next day…. It had gotten worse. I decided it would be better for me to stay home and go get tested for something that had been going around. My results came back and well…. I had tested positive for strep throat. I felt so bad especially since I am one of the 2 main characters. I spent hours working on the script and I didn’t even get to perform it or see my friends act out scenes I had made. I am so thankful that my team reacted how they did and they are all so amazing. I’m so proud of them for doing as well as they did and learning new lines in such a short time. So now that this information is out there it’s time to see how my group did. Here is the video of their performance.
I’m really proud of my team for doing as well as they did without me and I’ll be sure to be there next time at provincials.
So now comes the part of the blog where I usually reflect on the driving question, however there isn’t one this time so I’m just going to look back on a few things. Firstly I think we could have improved by… well… you know…. Having the whole team there but we could have also communicated slightly more as a groups so we didn’t have to cram so much into the last week. But I think compared to most of the groups my team did really well with setting times for things to get done. I also think we worked really well together despite most of us being introduced to eachother for the first time in this process. But in terms of personal reflection, honestly I expected to hate every second of DI, but through this journey I learned a few things about myself like before I didn’t know this but I’m actually a pretty good script writer and it’s actually quite enjoyable. I also learned that I am more capable than I thought and I can get things done in a shorter time than I think if I try my best and put my mind to it.
With that I’m going to wrap up this blog post with one question for you.
Do you think we can win Provincials?
Actually I’ll wrap up with an answer for you
Yes we can.
From Pikachu to Seattle and all the crazy things in between
So you’ve come to me, on the day of my Pikachu presentation, to learn about how we got here today. Well then let me tell you a tale of memorization and stress. Welcome to my blog post about the “Craziest” project so far. This is proven by the title and driving question being “Cray Cray Yay Yay” and “Why does it take a crazy person to change the world?”. But I’ll come back and answer that later.
First of all we started out by defining what is crazy? You might think you know the answer but your probably wrong (unless you’ve read another blog post about this project). We are actually defining crazy like it’s used in the Apple “Think Different” campaign. To help explain that I am going to quote this campaign,
“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” -Steve Jobs – 1997
Does it make sense now? I sure do hope so because the amount of times I’ve heard the definition by this point is driving me crazy. Here’s a fun game you at home can play, try and count every time the word “Crazy” is written, spoken or used in this blog.
Now that we know what crazy is let’s talk about what a Pecha-Kucha is, or as I like to say, Pikachu. So this term is Japanese for “Chit Chat” and is a type of presentation. It is a 20×20 presentation which means we have 20 slides and each of them will last 20 seconds leading to 6 minutes and 40 second of total stress and waffling (waffling is talking a lot about things).
But after this happened we went on a super fun trip to Seattle where we saw such wonders as the Museum of Pop Culture and Madame Web! We went on this trip with one thing in mind, the crazy ones of Seattle, and trust me there are a lot of them. Some of these people and experiences that we had the pleasure of visiting are The MoPop, The Space Needle, The Chihuly Glass Gardens, The Climate Pledge Arena Tour, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Museum of Flight and The Boeing Tour. As you can see, we went to a lot of places and subsequently learned a lot from this trip.
This trip helped me visualize what crazy people have done such as Frank Ghery, Paul Allen and Bill Gates. I saw the things these people built their legacy upon and how their passion fuelled them to keep going. Here are some images from Seattle.
Sorry some of these are smaller than others.
Prior to this trip we had been given groups and a topic, you can check out my teammates at http://www.blog44.ca/brooker/ and http://www.blog44.ca/loganf/ so go show them some love too. Our topic was Aerospace Pioneers, so I was waiting for the Museum of Flight and Boeing tours. It was there where I gathered most of my notes and photos throughout the whole project.
This trip ended with one big thing, and no it wasn’t the bus ride home, It was an essay all about the crazy ones of Seattle. This essay was used to convey what crazy is and also try to answer the driving question. If you would like to read it here it is.
Are you crazy? You might think, “No, why would anyone want to be crazy?” but “crazy” has more than one definition. Crazy people are the ones who do something nobody else is willing to do because they are driven by passion for something they love, and even when struck with adversity they find workarounds continue doing what they love, because they believe it can affect others and change the world for the better. But what are some examples of crazy?
Firstly I want to talk about a crazy name that you may have heard of, Microsoft or more importantly Bill Gates. He and Paul Allen turn their hobby of computer science and coding into a huge company the whole world knows of today. For most of their career people thought of them as exclusively a video game console company, however Bill knew they could be more than that. With his expansive knowledge of technology, and immense funds earned by Microsoft, Bill Gates looked into investing in technology that could actually help people and is now using his status as a billionaire and founder of Microsoft to make new innovations and advancements such as AI that can predict what diseases mosquitoes could be carrying. This is an example of a crazy person as when nobody thought anymore of him than a gaming company owner, he pushed to give Microsoft a new name in the form of helping people who need it.
Now for a less known crazy idea, Climate Pledge Arena. If you don’t know what it is, it’s an enitre arena dedicated to having as low of a carbon footprint as possible print as possible. They represent a cause not a company and have become a part of a group called the climate pledge, their goal is to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. This is a crazy idea because of how many unique innovations and designs they use in order to achieve this goal, some examples of these are making all food from sources within 300 miles, having 0 single use plastics, using 150 gallons of rain water to make the hockey rink and saving 20,000 gallons of water every event that happens there from washrooms alone. This seems insane at this time but in the future if we want the planet to survive, this will become the new standard and climate pledge area is the foundation of this new norm.
A name you may have heard before is Boeing, but you might not know what he really did. Boeing was just a guy who went to an air show but from that stemmed his love and passion of aeronautical activities. While he started as a lumber worker he used the money he earned from his job to fund his hobby of flight. At this time nobody saw flight as anything more that’s just long distance mail delivery but Boeing could see a future nobody else could. He was considered crazy for wanting to put people on planes for transport, but he went against what everyone told him and made the first plane dedicated to the delivery of humans, not mail. This plane was far from perfect though, so he adapted and innovated to make these flight the most comfortable and safe options of travel, even when he would encounter large difficulties he kept trucking forward and essentially built the standard of flight today.
But to conclude I personally have been inspired by people and ideas like these who do things nobody else is willing to do. This has helped me realise that things I am passionate about could be developed in ways that nobody would ever think of and things we do everyday could be completely morphed even ten years into the future. Anything can be developed into something that changes the world for everybody and if you truly love and have passion for something, you can turn it into something others would be eager to learn about. These things have given me a whole new definition of the word crazy and I now know there’s more to everything than it would seem. These crazy people teach us that there are no restrictions on the things we love, the only boundaries are those we but on our imaginations.
Fast forward through all the slide making and script writing and we are finally at presentation night and everyone is terrified of messing up, however we worked hard on this so we knew we would somewhat survive the evening. My group started by having to redo almost our entire presentation. Your probably wondering “Why?”, well this project was lead by two of my teachers, one of which happened to be on another field trip for the week before the presentation. My other teacher had already approved all my groups slides so I assumed we were good to go, but when my other teacher got back she wanted us to make all our slides completely different. I don’t know what happened with my two teachers but it seems that there was a lack of communication between them. So I made all the changes to our slides (not all of which I agreed with, rest in peace little planes, if you know you know) and moved on with the night. We practiced our roles throughout the night and off we went.
Here are some photos of the night.
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Sorry this one is sideways -
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That about wraps up this blog post and this project, but now it’s reflection time. So let us return to the driving question, “Why does it take a crazy person to change the world?” By this definition of crazy, it takes someone who is daring and willing to do what others will not to change the world, they fight for what they believe and push through and innovate when faced with challenges. These people change the world because they are the ones bold enough to do so.
This project has given me a whole new perspective on crazy and also taught me a lot about public speaking. Sorry this was such a long blog post it was actually supposed to be 2 but I thought it would be a better fit to have it all in one so I hope it was worth it. Thank you for reading my blog and I will write to you next time.