It has been exactly 60 days since my classmates and I started our latest maker project, Destination Imagination. So what in the world is DI? Good question. Destination Imagination is a project based competition in which teams of all ages, genders, and nationalities compete for the 1st place medal in their category. DI consists of six challenge categories five of which PLP takes part in. This being my first year of high school is also my first time participating in DI and I have to say, it is exhausting. When I say that I really mean it. We started working on our challenge sixty days ago and are still making changes and improvements. Believe me I have stayed up late, worked in school past the bell, worked on weekends, and gone to school early in order to succeed. But just because something is exhausting doesnât mean itâs necessarily something I hate. If Iâm being honest, during those times where I was doing work at early or late hours I did kind of hate it but the experience as a whole has taught me some valuable lessons about teamwork, communication, and work ethic. Anyway, enough ranting letâs get to it.
  Letâs go back in time, sixty days, January 14th 2019. On this date I received the list of people I would be working with for the next two months. Not only that but I also learned which of the five challenges I would be completing. I bet youâre wondering which challenge and who my teammates are. Before I say I need to go back about one week farther. We walked into our maker classroom and previewed the challenge rules for each category. The categories are; Technical: On Target, Engineering: Monster Effects, Artistic: Game On, Improvisational: Headâs Up, and finally Scientific: Medical Mystery. After taking a little look at each challenge we were sent a google form in which we would give the reasoning behind wanting a specific challenge. My top three choices were; Scientific, Engineering, and Improv. Guess what, lucky me I was placed in the Scientific group with my teammates, Kira, Rhiann, Finn, Angelo, and Kaden. As a result we started the process off with a, wait for itâŠ..FLOP!
  So that was an interesting way to end a paragraph am I right. Well here is why I like to describe it like that. In our challenge rules and guidelines it clearly states that there are three main elements to our central challenge. They are; The Story, The Symptomatic, and the Double Vision. There is also a small intro paragraph telling us what exactly weâd be doing. So what is that? Basically, we had to find a disease, disorder, injury, or mental illness that we as a group were curious about. After weâd chosen one we needed to do a ton of research on the symptoms, transmission/cause, treatment, historical significance, and basic description of the disorder. Once we had done all of our necessary research we moved on through different stages that our teachers had set up stages including recognize, imagine, and initiate & collaborate. After getting through those stages which really just helped us map out or plan for the solution, we got right into building, writing, coding, and rehearsing. Hold up. What do i mean by writing and rehearsing. Our main goal for the challenge was to create a story set in any time and place in which a human character is affected by the chosen disorder. With that we had to build a self operating symptomatic that would help to represent the anatomy and symptoms of the disorder and of course, integrate it into the plot. Finally we had to bring a scene with double vision to life with staging and blocking. So that is basically the lay out for the project, so why the flop?
  When we first started, our group dynamic just wasnât working out how weâd hoped. We were constantly arguing over the ways to complete things most effectively. Not only that but we also had a strange method of doing tasks. We would basically conquer and divide to get things done evenly. Evenly? Basically we would fan out everything that had to be done and would give out âevenâ amounts of work to everyone without even acknowledging each otherâs strengths and weaknesses. All these factors caused us to have a particularly rough start. Although that seem bad, especially for a competition, it opened up our eyes and lead us down new roads to a better finish. I gave us the understanding of what didnât work in our group and helped us avoid bumps in the road caused by the same factors.
  Anyway, Iâve now realized that there is sooooooo much more to write about that i anticipated and it is going to take two, maybe three posts. See you in my next post!
                     Ciara âïž
