Hello and welcome or welcome back to my blog. Today I am going to be talking about Destination imagination. A global competition that takes place every year. 

 

Before we start I should probably tell you about what DI is as I said DI is a global competition. There are three competition levels elementary, middle, and secondary. You are given a a challenge which is either technical, scientific, Feinartz, and improv. Some years there Is another type of challenge but this year they decided that it wouldn’t be an option. We were split into groups of up to seven people.

 

Challenge overview. The challenge that I was in was the scientific challenge. We were asked to create a story about a character who falls into a micro world. While in the Microworld the character had to encounter one mysterious object. We also had to have a microscopic imaging technique that enhanced the Microworld scenery. This was the only challenge that a backdrop was actually required because it was a part of the microworld scenery at least that’s what I’ve been told. We also had to have a special effects that enhances the mysterious object. I’ll get more into that and what my group did later in this blog post. 

 

At the start, destination imagination seemed like a simple thing. Just a silly Little competition where we had to perform a stupid play about microscopy in my groups case. I feel like the reason we thought this was because at the start, around November we were only focussing on learning about our challenge. Around January things started to get more and more serious. We made a script that we actually really liked. Daniel made a backdrop frame. We all met up and we made a backdrop which later evolved into something bigger. Then we had our first dress rehearsal.

 

At Our first dress rehearsal we were supposed to have everything finished. We had nothing done. Well almost nothing we had that backdrop and the backdrop frame. Our teamwork skills were terrible. We never met up to work on things, didn’t text each other in group chats to see when we were available or if someone needed something, and just didn’t do anything. After a Loon lake it was really a wake up call for us that we really needed to get things done or else we wouldn’t have a finish challenge solution for April 2.

(spoiler alert we almost forgot a few things)

It was only after spring break that we really started to do things. We realized how little time we had before the tournament. We met up every single day for a week to get things done. We started making things like the leaf, the gem, the crown, And we started to practice more and more and nail our script. But obviously every single time we tried to do it without the teachers watching we burst into laughter and wasted a bunch of time trying to regain ourselves, But failed miserably every single time. The last few days before the competition were definitely the most stressful. One of our team members was in Mexico and completely missed the tournament, and me and one other person met up two days in a row just us, because our other team members were busy. The day of a competition I went over to Daniels house early and we packed everything up. Luckily on Thursday (the tournament was on a Saturday) Almost all of my team members and I went over to Daniel’s house and brought everything including tiny little props, backdrop pieces and more with the help of some of Christians friends.

Drawing this project I learned quite a few things. I learned how to manage such a large scale project, I learned how to communicate better with groups, and I learned how destination imagination works. Managing a project the size of destination imagination was something I never thought I would be doing. If I was doing mainstream I would probably be writing a test or completing worksheets. Before this I have never even thought about doing a Projects of that scale. It takes a ton of communication and teamwork, and there’s no easy task despite it’s seeming like that at the start of the year when we first started working on it. During this project communication was required. My group had pretty good communication, but at times some people would be texting and others would be just ignoring everything, or we couldn’t find a time that worked for everyone to meet. 

 

Completing our project took a lot of work. We had to build so many things. We made almost all of our things, and I am pretty sure that the only things we didn’t make were the plant pot, the jail cell (wich was a dog gate that was held up) and the cape, which Brooke already had. We built all of our props out of cardboard, and we painted them all. The frame was made of old wood that Daniel and Chris found in the forest. From what I’ve heard, it was somewhat buried underground; they dug it out with rocks. How true is this? I do not know. What I do know is that the wood was very very old. We painted the backdrop sometime near the end of February, and it looked like a stone wall, and was supposed to look like something you would look at when using dark field microscopy. When we had about a week until the tournament, we made things that we had forgotten like the leaf, the crown, swords for the guards, and last minute, the night before the tournament, I made a key to unlock the jail cell. 

 

Besides all of the building we did, we also had to do a ton of work with the creative process. The creative process is: recognize, imagine, initiate and collaborate, assess, and evaluate and celebrate. We did a lot of recognize and imagine, but as time went on we started focusing less on the steps of the creative process and more of panicking about the fact that one of our team members was stuck in Mexico and was going to miss the DI tournament, and we didn’t have everything ready. We were great at planning, I know. 10/10. 100%. Anywayyyyyyssssssss, recognize was a very important step. We learned all about our challenge. How many points we could get, what we couldn’t do, What safety precautions we had to take, and the extreme basics of our challenge. We also had to go through our rules of the road document and highlight a bunch of stuff. Imagine was another step of the creative process that we took a long time to do. This was the stage where we were coming up with ideas for possible solutions, team names, and script ideas. My group and I had a very large amount of ideas. One of which was about a revolution. The problem was that it was extremely long and boring. So Brooke Daniel and I met up at Daniel‘s house, and we just brainstormed and wrote the entire script within two hours I’m pretty sure it was. Well we didn’t have backdrop pieces or props or anything like that we did have a fully completed script that most of us had memorized.

Instant challenges. A challenge where you have a specific amount of time to complete a task. There are three types. One where you have to build something, one where you have to build something and create a scene where are you present the thing, and One where you present a scene. These all have very specific guidelines, but there aren’t very specific either. For example one time we had to do one in class where we had to make a tower out of spaghetti and paper labels. We had to make it as tall as possible. It didn’t say anything about attaching it to the floor. You have to pay attention when you are doing instant challenges because there could be a possible way to make your solution work even if it seems like it can’t. At the tournament, we had to complete an instant challenge,  but we are not allowed to say anything about it. 

Here is a recording of our preformance!

The names of my team members for this year‘s destination imagination tournament were Daniel, Brooke, Christian, Francis, Jasper, and Seth.

 

If you have made it this far, thank you for reading! 

Bye

Keira 🙂