As you should know PLP takes part in the annual Destination Imagination (DI) competitions. Last month we competed in regionals and we just attended provincials last week. DI is a way to express your learning to compete against others, if you are still confused click here.  My group was made up of Nik, Lucy, and Paisley who all brought strong ascpects to the project.

Things we changed since Regionals

My group made a lot of changes for provincials. We had already planned to in our debrief but I went around asking people who I didn’t know, what they thought or any critique they could give without giving me ideas. I then talked to the group and we started brainstorming things we could do to make it better. The biggest change we made was completely changing a role in the play. Our main character originally was Nik but we thought since Lucy does acting outside of school that she should have a bigger part than the narrator. The change in roles actually added some comedy since in the beginning the narrator talks about how he didn’t get the part he wanted.

Another big change was adding another scene. After the first performance we could tell that some people were confused about the storyline and what happened, as Evie (me) was missing but came back to rescue her family with a boat that she got from an old man. This new scene shows Evie meeting the old man and them making a deal where she gets the boat. We were able to add this scene with Nik playing the old man as all he has to do was a minor costume change. We got a lot of positive feedback on this scene which we were very happy about.

Our last major change was making a brand new team choice element. After regionals we  realized we had almost no props and the stage didn’t look enough like a different place. So we decided to make a palm tree and a steering wheel to add on to the set and use in the Musical. In the first act there is a line about palm trees and it is easy to see one and in the second act we start driving home with the steering wheel for the boat. We made these props out of foam board, pool noodles, cardboard, and coloured paper. This change also ended up being successful as we scored way better on this team choice element than on the one in regionals.

Provincials

On the day of provincials we got to practice setting up the projector about 10 minutes before starting. The night before I had also realized that I left my costume in my locker so I put together a similar outfit with the same sort of idea. Unlike regionals it actually worked! The main problems we had was missing some stage ques, messing up on a few lines, and running out of time. Everything else went really well. I wasn’t able to make it to my instant challenge because I had to umpire a baseball game but my group told me it did it go very well. We still felt proud of ourselves though, because we won the instant challenge at regionals.

 

What I learned

Recently there was a study that came out on DI’s website stating that “Students who participate in Destination Imagnion become better at creative and critical thinking, collaboration and idea generation”. In my opinion, I don’t find this 100% true or false. This is because to make this study fully accurate you would need two of the same exact person and see if DI made the person any more creative than the one who didn’t do it. The way the study is right now, the study comes from the people who chose to do DI which can change how much creativity they have about it. My personal thoughts on DI were very stressful and took a lot of hard work but seeing it in the end and seeing everything we created, made me feel really proud of myself. I also had to adapt to being in groups with different people. There was quite a lot of conflict in my group but we all figured it out and we realize now that a lot of it came from the time counting down to competition and feeling unprepared. If I got the choice to do DI again I don’t know if I would do it. I think I would really enjoy doing some of the challenges like scientific or Improv because I feel like the use my crazy weird thoughts into something cool. However even if I wouldn’t choose to do it again I’m still very happy I did. It really helped me with my quick thinking skills.