Destination Imagination…

My first destination imagination was quite eccentric. People running around, so many forms and most of all, the exhaustion. Throughout the entire thing, I could tell everyone was tired, staying up late nights working on their projects. Regardless, everyone was up at 8:00am ready to present. Even though we had some bumps in the road along the way, we persevered to get to this moment. We were all excited, anxious, waiting months for this moment.

Of course, throughout this project, we were lead by the curricular competencies. The curricular competencies definitely helped me recognize what we were getting out of this project and how we would get to a finished stage. This project was only led by one competency mentioned below.

Research and Understand: The research and understand competency is based around researching and solving problems. I think I am between an accomplished state and extending state in this competency as I led my group through the challenge, thinking, creating and motivating my group members. I think I was the leader of the group who helped motivate my group and solve problems.

The months leading up to the tournament were stressful to say the least. We had to work together to create a viable solution to our team challenge. Our team was given the scientific challenge. My group was with Nathan, Liam, Ryder, and Raymond. This challenge was all about nature, we had to introduce an outsider species such as a chameleon to a new habitat such as a desert. Then, we had to show how the chameleon morphed to adapt to the new habitat and we had to show how the habitat morphed to accompany the chameleon. Once we solved this, we had to come up with two team choice elements to show our creativity and to earn us all the more points. DI also consisted of an instant challenge, which each team would perform to earn extra points. The instant challenge could be building, thinking, a story or even cooking. We had to prepare for the instant challenge. We had challenges prepared by our teachers to practice.

To kick off our journey into DI we started with milestone 1, which was a challenge identification form. This form was to recognize what parts of the challenge our team needed to focus on most. When we completed this form we recognized that we needed to focus on our story the most because thats what gave us the most points. We also realized that we shouldn’t spend too long on the technical element that would change the habitat because it would give us the least amount of points. Naturally, we didn’t listen to this and our story wasn’t the best while our technical element was godly. We bit the dust with this one as when we reflected on it we realized that that was the main reason why we didn’t win the tournament.

Milestone 2 was also based around forms, this time focused on our teams deliverables and what our team was the best at and how we would approach the specific parts of the challenge.  We found out that our team would be the best at engineering, so we focused our challenge around that. Then we got to the action. We knew we would excel at engineering so we created a hydraulic arm as our technical element.  Milestone 2 was easy, but it definitely helped us recognize our challenge and what our strengths and weaknesses were.

Milestone 3 was surprise surprise, more forms. This time the forms was team roles and responsibilities. These forms helped us get our group organized and to get us to start actually working on the challenge. I could tell my group was reluctant to get going with the building, but once we finished these forms, everyone was organized, working and creating a unique solution. I think these forms are very crucial to the process of DI because it streamlines the workload from person to person and whips people into shape to stop being lazy and actually get their hands dirty.

Guess what, milestone 4 was more forms. These forms were designed to create a timeline for how long it would take each group member to complete their assigned task. You had to write down whatever you were working on, then slot a time to work on it, then write in how much time you thought it would take you to do that task. I think these forms aren’t as needed as the team roles and responsibilities, but they are still important as once again, it organizes the group and streamlines the process between building, rehearsing and innovating. When my group finished this form, I could tell how everyone had “restarted their systems” and was ready to work again, now that everything was organized. We also knew then what time we would finish creating and start rehearsing, so that was big for us.

Throughout these milestones, we had been innovating, creating, perfecting and reflecting on what we had done up to this point and what we could improve on. We had chosen a proboscis monkey as our outsider species morph, and that monkey would be introduced to a British Colombia Rainforest. Our technical element to show the habitat morph would be a robotic arm, shown below. The outsider species morph would be the monkeys growing fur and claws. The general idea for the habitat morph would be that the monkeys would grow so exponentially because no predators could kill them, then the monkeys would eat up everything in the forest, and it would become barren and rotten. How we would show this would be to knock down all the trees which we created. The technical method for this would be to have the robotic arm knock down the trees. The outsider species morph would be the monkeys growing fur because the B.C. Rainforest is so cold. Then since there are new predators such as Black bears in the rainforest, the monkeys would grow claws to defend themselves. Our team choice elements were music composed by one of our group members, Raymond (MUSIC BELOW).The second team choice element was a ukulele song performed by all our our group members and even made by our group. The song would show the end harmony between the habitat, the predators and proboscis monkey.

Next, once we had all of those things, we had to rehearse our story. Our story was that proboscis monkeys would escape from the zoo and find their was to the B.C. Rainforest. Then they would not know any of the native plants and natural food, so they would go to sleep and morph into ravages, with claws and thick fur. While they were sleeping, part of our first team choice element, the music would play. It would play a calming sleep music to tone the mood. When the monkeys came out, they would eat everything in sight. Then as they were eating, a big black bear protecting their cubs. The black bear would chase the monkeys while the second part of the first team choice element played. The chase music. It also toned the mood for a scary chase happening. The monkey would try to climb the tree, but then since the trees were rotten, the tree would fall down and the technical element would fall into play, knocking the tree over. Then, when the bear realized the monkeys did not mean any harm to her cubs, they would all play the ukulele as our second team choice element. Displaying the harmony between nature, predators and prey.

We rehearsed this many times, just to make sure we had it down pat. Finally it was the day of Destination Imagination. All of our hard work, researching, innovating, and creating had gone into this day. We got there with all our forms, ready to present, except we were presenting our challenge at 12:20pm and we were there at 8:00am. This was good so that we could rehearse many times before the actual presentation. We saw kids way younger than us, but we also saw kids much older than us, so it kind of evened out. While we were rehearsing, our technical element BROKE. So as fast as I could, I fixed it and we were on our way out to the stage. We had 6 minutes to present, including the time it took to get our props ready. Unfortunately, we took about 2 minutes to set up so we had to shorten our presentation a little bit and about halfway through, once we morphed while we were eating all the leaves, one of our group members knocked down the trees before they were supposed to be knocked down. Luckily our narrator, saved us, cracking a joke to make it look like that was supposed to happen and we moved on. Everything else worked great. Once we finished, the appraisers (judges) asked us a few questions about the presentation and we moved on to our instant challenge set a few hours later. Unfortunately, I cannot speak about the instant challenge as it is supposed to be kept a secret. After the instant challenge was over, our team celebrated our first Destination Imagination and it was over. Then, we headed over to the awards ceremony, where we did not win anything and headed home.

Overall, I think this this DI experience was great as it was a great way for me to learn more about my group members and just grow as a learner. Throughout this, I expanded my knowledge and skillset through learning together and increased my group working skills and mindset. I am kinda looking forward to DI provincials but also not at the same time because it was such a stressful experience but I enjoyed it none the less.