It’s a race, its a chase! Hurry up and feed there face! Who will win, no one knows? Feed those Hungry Hippos!! That song may sound familiar. Maybe you heard it on an advertisement for this world renowned game, Hungry Hungry Hippos or even on the video that was on my last DI blog post. This song is what named the end of my final DI performance with my team of Jackson, Lucy, Fraser and Kyle…. we call ourselves the Sea Hippos!

Welcome back to My Dog Ate My Blog and to anyone who reads this post. Today, we will be discussing the improvements we made between the Destination Imagination Regional and Provincial Tournaments, what a tournament is like, and what I have learned from my experience. Before I waste another 200 words trying to describe DI, here is the link to my last blog post, for more information check out the official website here, or go ahead and click the bar you see below.

Destinaiton Imaginaiton (or DI) is a non-profit organization that brings together students, teachers, and many others from all around the globe. Teams compete in tournaments to be named the champion at globals. DI brings out the creativity in people through difficult challenges of all different kinds. Scientific, Fine Arts, and Technical are just a few examples. These challenges are to give students confidence and to show them that they can do anything if they just imagine it!

IMPROVEMENTS

Between the regional and provincial tournament, all teams had a total of four weeks to make changes. My team chose three things to make bigger, better and stronger, 2 from the judges and one we chose. These included our team choice elements (Light up shirt and Hippo masks), Game Research incorporation into script, and appearance of our container. Now, for efficiency and organization purposes, we used something called a burn down chart.

So, we created a burn down chart for each of things we wanted to improve.

The Light up Shirt:

The Hippos Masks:

The Script:

And the Container:

Once these charts had been fully burned down, these improvements were done!

I added 8 more lights to the shirt which took a lot more work, surprisingly. It looked a lot better though. Adding more lights made it very obvious that it was one of our team choice elements.

The biggest change we made to the origami hippo masks was cutting holes in them so that we wouldn’t have to yell as much. It was a bit difficult to hear the dialogue of our performance when our mouths were covered by paper.

The script basically stayed the same. The only changes we made was adding a bit more research that we did on the game, here is an example:

The Final change we made was to the appearance of the egg/container. We wrapped it in a sheet so it looked a bit cleaner.

I think the biggest lesson I learned about improving is that if you have time, if you have a full 4 weeks to change things up, use it! I don’t think we used the time we had to the fullest and that took a toll, but we will talk more about that later. The whole point of the break between regionals and provincials is to really blow up the creativity aspect of all parts of your challenge, to make it ten times better than it was before.

A DAY AT DI (A SUMMARY)

For those of you that have never experienced a DI tournament, this is for you. Now, I am not about to go into a play by play of the whole day, don’t worry. Its going to be more about the different feelings you get through out the day. Here is a cool little timeline I made in Canva for you guys to Visualize the times and the feelings through out the day. It is quite spread out so just keep scrolling to se the whole thing!

Now that is what a regular day at DI looks like. That isn’t exactly how my team’s day went. Because of unfortunate circumstances we were disqualified from the tournament. This taught me a huge lesson about respect and honesty. Things could have been different if I had talked to my teachers about it but it is what it is. Another big part of DI that I can take with me every where I go is to stay positive. It a stressful experience that can be overwhelming and intimidating but if you look at the bright side of everything, it isn’t so bad.

Here is a video of our performance!!

REFLECTION TIME

First things first, let’s take a look at our raw scores we received from the appraisers at provincials:

As you can see from first glance, the scores are a little low, but lets just compare them to our regionals score with this handy dandy percentage chart my team and I created in Numbers. It is separated into each section of each category of each aspect of the challenge.

Uh oh, do you see it too? We got lower scores in every single category! And that may seem like a very bad thing (and it is) but it’s also a chance to learn from my mistakes and be better next year because I know what we did wrong. As I said earlier, not fully improving and upgrading on our performance as a whole really took a toll on our scores.

During Destination Imagination this year, I have learned so so much. So many lessons about teamwork, positivity, perseverance, and respect have showed them selves through hard work. I am so glad I had the opportunity to participate in DI this year and can’t wait for next year! Until next time….. SCENE!

~Jordyn