As every PLP student knows, the time after winter break is anything but chill time. In fact, it is the primary time for us to tackle our biggest and most ambitious project/unit/tournament type thing of the year, and of course, that is Destination Imagination. For those who don’t know, every year, all students between grade 8-10 in PLP compete in a challenging, yet innovative tournament known as Destination Imagination, or D.I for short. During this tournament, our job is to create a solution to a challenge we have been presented that falls into one of these areas: Technical, Engineering, Fine Arts, Scientific, Improv, or Service Learning. We then demonstrate our solution in a performance that includes elements specific to each challenge. Now this may seem not to hard, but if you want to learn about how an RC car can represent an eight legged horse belonging to Norse Gods, then read on!
The Journey to the Destination
Now at least for me, when I get a project like this, I want to dive right in. Yet, before that is possible, it’s important to understand what your going into. This is the preliminary part of D.I, which includes assignments such as worksheets and team building exercises, to really help us get the feel of what we are going into. Last year, Destination Imagination started in January, leaving us less time to prepare our solutions then I dealt would have been ideal. This year though, this was accounted for and we began preliminary planning as early as November. This began with us learning about each challenge and deciding which we would want to do. I decided early on that the technical challenge was for me, for this year’s concept of creating a device that could travel through a maze and building technical machines sounded intriguing. About a week after we submitted our top challenge choices, we received news of who would be on our team.
My team consists of Me, Lucas, Kai, Kiefer, and Jamie. I was overall happy with my group for everyone could offer something unique and innovative. Once we were together, we discussed our team challenge as a group and some ideas of what we could do to solve it. The overview goes basically like this: Our challenge is to create a maze traveller that can complete a randomly selected maze, along with having a performance that has a prop removal and prop transformation in it. We began with coming up with ideas for each of these main points, some of which included an Ancient Greek maze story, having the maze be metaphorical for the Mind, or having a Roomba as our maze traveller (which would have been very entertaining to use).
A brain storming session during D.I
After this, we began digging deeper into our challenge, so we could understand the details which although small played a huge role in our scoring. We did this through filling out worksheets about our challenge guide, asking our teachers questions, and deciding among ourselves how we felt about things. This, although seeming pointless and aggravating at the time, proved to have Use during creation and presentation of our solution. This were some of the things we did before winter break, and were not too challenging. However after winter break, things kicked into full D.I high gear.
Bringing Imagination to Reality
Our group started off the new year refreshed and ready to work, full of ideas and plans for our solution. We started off by conceiving a basic story we could work off of. The first idea that was tossed around was a Greek style story about an ancient maze and a hero who would venture through it. This then evolved into a story about Canadian History with some group members wanting to take a more realistic approach to our presentation. However, my group and I quickly realized retelling a story that has already been told so many times would be a challenge to make interesting.
Eventually, we went with both worlds, having the story rooted in the Viking times of Canadian history and going with the Mythology aspect from the Greek idea. We then researched our topic, and found many interesting characters and stories from the Nordic culture, and wanted to include as much of it as possible in our performance. During class, we also practiced something known as an Instant Challenge, which is a small challenge that we are given during the tournament and have to solve in limited time.
It took my group a bit to get into the construction phase, but after other groups began construction though, we began to do the same. This started with a few small props, such as a cardboard tree, some waves, etc. Then we made some bigger ones, such as the eight legged horse which our main character would ride on, backdrops, etc. After that, we began planning of the maze traveller, and I wasted no time getting to work on the costumes; my specialty topic. I went to the thrift store and was able to almost completely create all the costumes from stuff around my house and from the store. There was one costume however, that was a little more daunting, and that was our prop transformation and secondary villain; The Dark Elf guardian who transforms into a Lindworm dragon to fight the main character. This required wings which flapped open on the pull of a string through a pulley system. After some research and around 5 nights of fine tuning, I got them put together.
Now our group was ready! We had our props, a maze traveller (RC car), costumes, Script, what else was needed? Oh yeah, practice. When our group were called for our dress rehearsal, nobody knew what needed to go where, who said what, and well, it was a D.Isaster. No one knew their lines or transitions, many aspects where unfinished, and this all lead to many things making no sense such as why the main character road on an eight legged horse or why there was a person who played two characters in back to backs scenes.
A costume which was quite misinterpreted at our dress rehearsals
This failure was discouraging, but I decided to take it as a learning opportunity and started to push us to practice more. However, this didn’t occur too often and pretty much the same thing happened during our next Dress Rehearsal. This started to cause tension in our group, but despite efforts to get our group together to practice, it still didn’t happen. Then we soon came to the realization; it was the night before D.I, and we hadn’t practiced our performance through fully once.
Our team was in despair, fights broke out, people stopped doing what they had to to avoid conflict, and we couldn’t complete a run through without someone getting distracted. But then, when all hope seemed lost, Mrs Willemse and Mr Hughes came in and said they wanted to watch our dress rehearsal. So we did it, and it did go better than we expected. We then saw one of our flaws was looking to far into what may not work instead of focusing on just doing it. We took a break, came back later, and practiced again and again, until we couldn’t any more.
Our hectic last minute practice session
The next day, which was the tournament, we didn’t know what would happen. We were up first, and knew at least what would happen, would happen quickly and be over for the rest of the day. Yet, through our efforts the night before hand, we pulled together, put our spectacular props to use, and delivered a solid and engaging performance that the audience and appraisers loved! We also did quite well at our instant challenge, working together and helping each other out.
Watch our preformence here!
Highlights from our Preformence
My Reflection
As you can see from the story above, this year’s D.I has run anything but smooth, but we have pulled through and learned from this experience. Personally, I felt like I put in a lot of work to the props, script, and costumes and this was appreciated, but I know that I can support my team better. Instead of pushing for an insanely ambitious project that only I understand and am motivated to do, it would be a lot better to take the time to understand my group’s perspective and ideas so we can create a finished product that works well and everyone is happy with. As for our performance at regionals, we did significantly better than I had originally thought, but there is room for improvement for provincials. One of these areas is paying closer attention to fine details, such as if the maze traveller has actually left the maze and if our scoring is based on the traveller itself or it’s navigating tactics. We also could use some practice with our lines, acting, and transitions. Overall though, I felt that we pulled things together amazingly at the last moment and shone strong when our time came.