Communication, Confidence, Teamwork, and Creativity. Those are just some of the skills that I could use some practice in. I learned this during the long and grueling process of a little thing called Destination Imagination, or DI. Since December, the entirety of PLP 8, 9, and 10 has been sorted into teams to compete against each other. Destination Imagination is a world wide competition that puts your real world problem solving and team building skills to use. We were sorted into four different categories; Science, Technical, Engineering, and Fine Arts. I was put in the Scientific category. In each category there are 4-5 teams all competing against each other. In my category, our job was to make a play that had an archeological finding, an artifact that lead to the finding, and a puppet that was a character from the past. To get a better understanding of what DI really is, I recommend visiting this link. Destination Imagination

My team, the Sphinx Squad, consisted of 5 people. Charlie R and Christian L (grade 10s) and Lila, Gino, and me (grade 9s). We had to work together to meet all of the requirements of our challenge. Our finding (which is a discovery that changes or upholds human belief) was that the Egyptians weren’t the ones to build the sphinx. Our puppet was a meta-human (a human with supernatural abilities) that was part of the tribe that existed before ancient Egyptians, and built the pyramid. Our artifact was the chisels that discovered outside the sphinx, and with the use of relative dating, identified to be older than the ancient Egyptians. Our performance can be seen below.

Somethings that went really well during this process was our story. In the beginning, our team really struggled to come with a finding. But once we figured out what our finding was going to be, everything came easily. Our story came together, and the script was written after. Our performance went pretty well, especially since we thought we weren’t going to ready in time for DI. Imagine our surprise when we got second place! During our instant challenges, I think we did really well in using our key strengths. I can’t go into detail, since that would get team disqualified, but all I will say is that our teamwork and efforts really shone through during our instant challenge. 

Somethings that our team could really work on is communication. We wanted to set up meeting to work on our solution together, but some people didn’t check their iPads, or didn’t have the platform we were using on their phones, and we had a hard time communicating with each other. Something I could work on as a team member is checking in on my team members. We assigned the work that needed to be done to each team member, but we never checked in on the progress of each of our jobs. That lead to confusion, and work not being done, and last minute improvisations. So for the upcoming provincial tournament, those the things my group need to work on improving. 

I contributed a lot for my group in this challenge. I created our puppet, and made it work with technical engineering. I also made one of our backdrops, as well as our team poster. I think that it would have been helpful to have more than just Lila helping me with these tasks, and I will make sure to make this clear to my group when preparing for the next tournament. Through this process, I learned the importance of communication. Our group would have done a lot better with preparation, and performance if we had clear and frequent communication. I also learned what relative dating is, and how it is used. 

Overall, I think that this was a great learning experience for me and I can’t wait to see how we improve our weaknesses for the next tournament in April. I think that this was one of the most frustrating, things that I have done, but it has taught me many real world skills that I will most definitely be using even after school and college. I highly recommend checking out the DI website to learn more, because this will be a useful skill to learn for the future! Make sure to check out my teammates’ blog posts too! Lila’s, Gino’s, Charlie’s, and Christian’s