Around two years ago, my grade eight self sat in our Maker classroom after winter break, waiting for news on our next unit. As I had just made it out alive of our first two exhibitions, I was feeling pretty confident that I would be prepared for whatever the teachers were going to throw at us. I mean, there wouldn’t be any more big surprises after Term One, right? Well, boy was I in for a shock, because our new unit was not only going to be the biggest one of the year, but also one that thousands of kids across the world would be doing alongside of us. I am talking about the annual adventure that we have come to know as D.I., or Destination Imagination. Now when that little grade eight heard for the first time about building technical machines, researching advanced science, and doing it all with a team, she was absolutely terrified. I had no faith that I would be able to rise to this task in such a short period of time, and couldn’t possibly imagine actually winning anything from it. However, now that I have done D.I. for three consecutive years in a row, I realize that my teammates and I are not only able to rise to the occasion, but triumph during it. So far, we have came first in a total of seven challenges, and created some mind-blowing products. We have developed so many new skills, and been able to take every failure as a learning experience. It has truly been a journey that I will never forget, and in this post I will be saying a bittersweet goodbye to my time as a D.I. participant, and reflect on what I have gained in our journey to Provincials, and throughout my whole experience with it.

Our Progress

There is little use in me telling you how good we did without any proof. If you are interested, you can watch each of our recorded Destination Imagination performances up the this point below:

Grade 8 Provincials:

Grade 9 Provincials:

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Grade 10 Regionals:

D.I for Dummies

Hold on… if you just stumbled upon my blog by chance, you probably have no clue what the heck I’m talking about. Well luckily, you can find out all about what Destination Imagination is by clicking HERE. Also, if you haven’t already done so, check out the first half of our 2019 D.I journey here.

For a basic summary, Destination Imagination is a global tournament where students can form teams and solve challenges in creative ways. Each year, a new challenge is presented in six different categories, which include Scientific, Technical, Engineering, Fine Arts, Improv, and Service Learning. Our group this year, which is composed on myself, Alivia, Maggie, Morgan, and Tamara, decided to choose the Scientific Challenge, which is known as Medical Mystery. In solving this challenge, we were required to build a technical display of symptoms known as the Symptomatic, a two view perspective known as the double vision, and also include two elements of team choice which display our unique talents. If you want to know about our process towards solving this challenge, check out the post linked here.

From Regionals to Provincials – A Journey in it’s own

The first thing going through the minds of our group members after Regional’s was “That could have gone better”. Yes, we had a good story, but our lack of practice was a major problem, and so was the fact that cap of a bottle one of our Symptomatic technical methods was glued shut, which rendered it useless. Our team did end up coming first in both our challenge areas during the awards later that day, but I didn’t feel that our performance in it’s current state would hold up nearly as well at Provincials. So, after a quick spring break hiatus, we got to work figuring out what exactly needed fine tuning.

Something that we hadn’t used in previous D.I. years, but helped us wonders in pinpointing where we needed to work on were known as burn down charts. As the name implies, the goal of burn down charts is to compile a graphical list of everything your team needs to work on, and then see how much of the work you can burn down each day. You can see two examples of how these charts work below:

Symptomatic

I was quite upset when the technical method on the Symptomatic didn’t work, as it was my responsibility to make sure it did. I felt shameful that I didn’t meet our group’s standards, and made sure I outlined exactly what needed to be improved upon for Provincials when creating the chart. The main issue as you could see in our raw scores was with the symptomatic not working, and a simple way to fix this was just to remove the cap all together. We also lost points in translation when trying to explain how the Symptomatic worked to the appraisers, so I decided to come up with something known as a debrief Sheet, which outlined the most important things to highlight to the appraisers in the debrief (see examples below). There was also an issue during the performance of our main character Flora (Maggie) having the activate the Symptomatic all by herself, and so we thought a good fix would be to have Morgan operate it instead.

Story

The problems with our story lay not in the writing, but in the execution (aka we didn’t practice). So, in our burn down chart of this element, we outlined the most crucial things to rehearse, which include the pronunciations and actions. There is also mention of improving dramatic portrayal of the characters, because having actors who can really bring a character to life takes a performance to a whole new level. Another in this chart is once again a mention of a debrief sheet, which is a simple but powerful tool to include for any element.

On our burn down charts, we also included percentage goals, which outlined the exact percentage we wanted our scores to improve by for Provincials. I felt that this, along side of the burn down charts were powerful tools for me as I am a visual learner, and can plan much more effectively when representing tasks in a visual way. I also felt that it made things run a little more smooth in our group, as we could now all be on the same page of what we really needed to work on.

This week ended up flying by, and soon enough, we found ourselves driving up the road to…

The Provincial Tournament

This year, the B.C. Provincials were held at Collingwood Secondary in West Vancouver, which might I say is an amazing place to visit:

Once our group met up and frantically scrambled to claim a place in the prop storage room, we were free to do whatever we pleased until our instant challenge. Keeping my goals of listening to and trusting in my group in mind, I asked them one more time if they wanted to try a dress rehearsal. They said no, and so I dropped it. Then, before we could even regroup after the opening ceremonies, it was time for our Instant Challenge. I am not allowed by tournament rules to disclose the specifics of what happens during an instant challenge, but basically they are mini challenges which will be given to each team some time during the day, and teams will have no prior knowledge of what it will entail before entering the challenge room. Due to having what I feel was our absolute best I.C. ever during the Regionals Tournament, our group was pretty confident we were going to do great. However, we didn’t account for the fact that the challenge might be performance based, and ended up not being prepared for the task that was given. I felt really upset when we left the challenge room, as we had even planned and discussed our team roles before hand, but hadn’t done a good job.

Our whole group was pretty upset over this, but then we all thought back to the concept we had learned in grade eight of having a Growth Mindset, which focuses around learning from failures and moving past them. We discussed our results, and keeping this concept in mind we came to the conclusion that the best thing to do from this point forwards was to try our best during our main challenge, and make the most out of our final D.I day.

And that’s exactly what I did. As much as Destination Imagination is a competition, at it’s core it’s built around teamwork, learning, and having fun, and so I decided for this last day to shift my focus completely on to this. I went around the tournament, helping people move their props or open doors, and cheering for other teams. I talked to new people, and volunteered to hand out lunches to the appraisers. Then, just before our presentation, I kept in mind the idea of having a Win Win attitude from PGP, and through this was able to make friends with and cheer on another Secondary Scientific team, even though they were competition. Finally, the time for our performance came, and I made sure to give it my all during our small time on stage. Sure, our team was under rehearsed and it showed, but it didn’t matter because once again, we all had a blast.

Results

Although it was obvious that more practice would have helped our performance, I was happy with what happened. This was because a) the symptomatic didn’t leak! and b) our group really helped each other out on stage. As it turns out, the appraisers were happy with it too, as we ended up getting first! At this point, I really didn’t care about what place we came in, but it was nice to see that we improved. This was also nice, because we were able to see some definite improvement on our raw scores. There were many categories that we improved upon from regionals, and I was even able to check off my main focus area percentage goal, which was improving the technical design of the Symptomatic. Here is our score comparison:

Bye Bye, Miss you Already D.I.

Wait…it’s over? I cannot tell you how fast these three years of Destination Imagination have gone. Each time we work on it, I never give it’s end too much attention because you know, there is always next year, but now there isn’t a next year. This truly is our final destination. However, this rollercoaster of a journey has been overflowing with amazing moments, incredible innovation, awesome skill and team building, and of course, imagination. Even with all of the ups and downs, this time of the year never ceased to bring a smile to my face. It’s honestly been an experience like no other, and I don’t think I have the words to explain it. So instead, in light of my visual style of learning, will be completing this reflection in a creative pictorial format:

I am going to end this post off with a thank you note. Thank you to everyone who I have been in a team with for sharing all of your unique talents and work. Thank you to our team managers for helping us through thick and thin each year. And of course, thank you to every person who has been involved in Destination Imagination across the world, for making this all possible. Good bye D.I., you’ve truly brought me to an incredible destination.