Hello readers, and welcome back to my blog! In this post, I will be explaining and reflecting on my first year of Destination Imagination. Never heard of Destination Imagination? You can learn more about it here, or read my short description on it in my previous blog post about DI. By reading my mid-point blog post, you can also have a better understanding of my challenge.
Anyway, just a quick reminder, Destination Imagination is an educational experience that encourages creativity, critical thinking, problem solving & collaboration. In Destination Imagination ( DI ), students work in teams to create a solution to their specific STEAM challenge. Then after months of hard work and preparation, they present a solution to their challenge to a set of appraisers/ judges at an in person tournament. Not only do you have to present a solution to your challenge, but you also have to complete an “Instant Challenge”. Instant challenges are worth 25% of your overall score, and are either task based, performance based or a combination of the two. You don’t know what the instant challenge is going to be until it’s time for your team to quickly come up with a solution to them.
This year, I was put into a group for the “improvisational: festival frenzy” challenge. Our team used the stages of the creative process, to work our way to our final solution.
The major steps were Recognize, Imagine, Initiate & Collaborate, Assess and, Evaluate & Celebrate. The first step was Recognize. In order for everyone on our team to have a deep understanding of our challenge, we all downloaded the rules of our challenge, and read through it as a team, while highlighting the important facts. Then we made sure everyone was going to study the challenge requirements at home because next class we all had a test on how much we knew about our challenge. I studied the rules, but their are a lot of rules to remember, so if you had a clarifying question, you could could always ask your team or revisit the rules guide.
In this step, we also got our parents to sign an Interference contract, signing that they couldn’t help us or interfere with our challenge solution whatsoever. Recognize helped me get to know my team-mates’ strengths and interests as well.
The next step was “ Imagine”. This was a huge brainstorm of all the ideas you could think of, only limited by the constraints and rules of your challenge. Each team member filled out a chart filled with ideas, and then as a team, we narrowed down and grouped ideas together if they were similar.
Then it was time to research our 8 festivals. Surprisingly, I hadn’t heard of any of the festivals we chose to research. It’s interesting how there are so many festivals around the world and most people only know about the more common ones.
Then, here’s where things got a little bit chaotic. There was so many things you had to keep track of, and you had to get things done on time to be prepared for dress rehearsals. Our team used Basecamp to stay organized, and to upload all our contracts, and research about the festivals. Although everyone uploaded and added to our teams’ Basecamp, I want to thank Sydney for staying on top of our “to-do’s” and taking the lead role on organizing our Basecamp.
We practiced and practiced making our improv scenes. It was funny how bad some of our skits were when we weren’t presenting to anyone. Sometimes they made no sense and didn’t have that much of a plot. Sometimes (most of the time) we weren’t including too much information about the festival.
We had 3 dress rehearsals, where the teachers did their best to recreate what would happen at the tournament, then we would present our 2 act skit based on the festival and goal we randomly chose from the teacher. When we were done presenting our skit, the teachers would give us specific feedback like “ I don’t see that you have a binder or any papers with festival information that you could refer to during the 2 minute preparation time”. This feedback was very needed for my group to get better at our scenes.
As we approached the day of the competition, our team was working on planning rides to the tournament, who’s car we were going to decorate, and we were also all working on finishing our sign with our team name, number and school name.
And here we are at the Destination Imagination tournament after months of hard work, early morning meet-ups, collaboration, planning, creativity, problem solving and teamwork. I thought in the end our final challenge solution was pretty awesome. I predicted we were going to get Floriade before we were even at our challenge, because that was one we weren’t too good at compared to the other festivals we had practiced, and in the end we got Floriade. That just goes to show you, you have to be ready for anything in improv. Our festival was Floriade, our goal was to “ find the missing keys” and our fork in the road was “ choose the right flavour jellybean”. I think the appraisers loved our scene, because they were always smiling and laughed at some parts of our skit.
Here is our final solution:
Overall, Destination Imagination this year has been an interesting experience. Before grade 8, I had never even know what DI was, and I probably wouldn’t have ever done this if I wasn’t in PLP. I originally thought that April 2nd was so far away, and that we’d have tons of time to practice, but the time goes by fast. Thanks to this experience I was able to improve my skills of defining problems, making a plan for our team to achieve success, organization and creativity. Throughout DI, I was good at making sure we were keeping our skits central to the festival and including the cardboard boxes. I helped narrow down our really good ideas and made conclusions based on our ideas. I’ve gotten better at listening what others have to say as well, before saying no, but instead building on other people’s ideas to create even better ones, and that way everyone feels like their ideas are welcome and included.
When we had finished our Floriade improv scene, the appraisers gave us feedback and compliments on sticky notes. They had very positive things to say!
In the final Zoom meeting where they announced the winners of each challenge, I was surprised by how many Seycove teams placed first, second or third place. My team got second place for our improv challenge, placing right behind the other seycove team, The Indecisive Improv Troupe. We got first place for our Instant Challenge though, so that’s great! Although I am super proud of my team and how hard we worked, I am now wondering how many teams we were going up against, because it seemed like Seycove secondary placed top 3 in every challenge.
My favourite part of DI has been presenting our scenes to people. I feel like we did so much better in front of an audience, because it felt more official. The ultimate highlight of mine was when Sydney and I sang a song about the Pushcar camel festival, in one of our dress rehearsals. It was so fun, and we incorporated the boxes as every color and size of camel, it felt like we could’ve been in a official music video.
The one sad thing is that we didn’t get to see other group’s performances. We presented ours and then left, but in the videos Ms. Willemse showed us about other DI tournaments, it looked like everyone could go see other people’s performances and cheer them on. I wish we could’ve done that, but I enjoyed presenting our scene nonetheless.
Thank you so much for reading this post!
Make sure to check out my team-mates blogs: