Hello world! Welcome back to my blog! This post is going to be about Destination Imagination, and my experience with it so far. This is sort of in replacement of my final geek out post, but if I have time, I’ll come back to my baking blog! Let’s get right into it! 

What is Destination imagination / DI ?

Destination imagination is a worldwide competition that encourages students to achieve “ anything they can imagine”, with detailed project-based challenges. There are 7 different challenges, the same ones that the rest of the world are given, and you and your team are trying to create a solution to your team’s challenge. You can learn more about this year’s challenges here. Then, on April 2nd you will present your solution at a live tournament and appraisers / judges will determine your score. The challenges that the grade 8’s are doing this year are: Daring Escape: Technical, Festival Frenzy: Improvisational, Tricky Tales: Fine Art, and Up Close: Scientific.

My group was composed of Sydney, Silas, Andrew, Frankie and I. The challenge that we were doing was “Festival Frenzy: Improvisational”. So yes, it’s right in the title, we we’re going to be doing improv.

The deliverables for this challenge are:

Festivals: Since my team is competing in the intermediate level, we must do an in depth research about 8 festivals from the list, so that we can properly represent them and incorporate the festivals into our improv scenes. At the tournament, we will not know which festival we’ll be presenting until the 2 minute preparation before our act #1.

Goal: Our skit must include at least one character or several characters trying to achieve a goal at a festival. Goal examples include: “Train a cat to come when called”,  “build a sauna in your backyard” or “dig a very deep hole”. Like with the festival, our team won’t know our skit goal until the 2 minute preparation time before our act #1.

Fork in the road: We must present a two-act skit in 5 minutes. When we decide and signal to the appraisers that our act #1 is complete, we will randomly select a piece of paper with the Fork in the road. On the piece of paper their will be two fork in the roads, and our team must choose which option we are going to incorporate into our skit during the 30 second intermission. Fork in the road example: A. Swim in a tub of pudding or B. Take violin lessons.

Box set: We must enhance our skit with a set of 1-10 commercially produced cardboard boxes. We are not allowed to modify or decorate the boxes prior to our presentation. We can use the boxes for props during our act. During the 5 minute presentation, we are allowed to assemble or break down boxes.

Here is how my challenge is scored:

Basically, your team’s overall score is the sum of the score you receive for your solution to the main challenge (75% of scoring) and then your team’s instant challenges score ( 25% of your score ). Now are you wondering what an instant challenge is? Instant challenges are quick challenges that you do as a team. Each team will be pulled aside to complete their instant challenge. In this short amount of time, you have to use your teamwork, creativity and teamwork skills to create a final product. We have been practicing some instant challenges since the beginning of the year. Here is a photo of an instant challenge; it’s was my team’s spaghetti and mailing label, free standing tower:

 

Accomplishments:

So far my DI team has worked well together by staying organized and on top of our tasks. Our challenge is different from the others because we don’t have team choice elements and don’t have to build or create any props. I wish we had to build or create some type of back drop or prop because I love art and creating things hands on. So far my team has determined   everyone’s role / manager for each category. I’m the risk and quality manager as well as a story manager support. 

I think one of the hardest parts of DI is the decision making; it’s all up to you and your group. The teachers aren’t allowed to interfere with our team challenge solution in any way. They can give us tips and tell us what we need to get done, but they can’t come up with solution ideas for us. That means we have to make plenty of decisions every time. One of the hardest parts yet was, believe it or not, choosing a team name. Sounds simple right? Well, our group didn’t have very many good name ideas and when someone suggested any, nobody liked it. It was very hard to reach a consensus with my team, and in the end, nobody really loves our team name : Operation Unplanned.

We have also started practicing some improv scenes, by incorporating the festival and the goal into the skit. Then when we decided the first act was done, we would choose between two fork in the roads to include in our act two. I think some of our improv scenes are not great because we get to carried away in accomplishing our goal, that we don’t do a great incorporation of the festival.

Growth opportunities:

I make it my goal to make sure my DI team is beeing productive with our time and is improving our improv skills and scenes. I think that we need to get better at making our story flow better, so that we’re not just randomly adding a fork in the road to our skit or having multiple conversations at once, because that will confuse our audience. 

Thanks for reading this post! I’ll be back for my complete Destination Imagination post in April!