DI regionals blogpost 💭

These past few months have been quite chaotic as Destination Imagination put everyone’s capabilities and skills to the test. Through this process unlike any other, I developed and expanded various skills. Skills like communication, collaboration, problem solving, and time management were used throughout the process. I found myself in situations I hadn’t experienced ever, and I think that it was very beneficial for me. This helped me develop important life skills and further my knowledge. When Starting this project I wasn’t expecting to experience that much stress, frustration, anxiety. I found myself working on DI for hours at a time.

Destination Imagination is described as “A project based, kid-driven program that teaches kids to be innovative problem solvers. Using STEAM, teams of students collaborate, think outside the box and create unique solutions to one of seven different challenges in preparation for a fun, problem-solving competition.” – https://www.destinationimagination.org 

Students are put into teams and they are grouped into different categories. There are 4 categories:  fine arts, technical, science, and engineering. I selected Science as my category because I was most interested in the science part of DI, and the idea looked interesting to me. I was then put into my group with Esther, Gino, Christian, and Charlie. Right off the bat we were struggling with developing ideas, and our group couldn’t settle on just one idea. At first we wanted to do ancient Egypt, then we wanted to do Atlanta, but it was already being used by a different group, so we finally settled back with ancient Egypt. It was a long month of just planning and getting everything situated and decided. Then with only a couple weeks left till regionals it was crunch time. Everyone was trying to complete their puppet and team choice element. It was honestly quite chaotic and stressful.

I think my team could have definitely improved on our communication during this presentation. Everyone kind of had a job to follow through with, but it was difficult when someone wasn’t getting the message or didn’t understand what they were supposed to do. Another factor of our groups missed-communication may have been that we started of by using Base Camp as our main source of communication. Half way through this process we decided it would be more effective to switch to messages so that people are getting their notifications right to their phones. Even though this worked for a little while I think some people in my group started to just tune out the messages, and thats where the communication went wrong. If I were to do this again I would make sure that everyone’s notifications are on, or just schedule one day a week where we get together. 

As for the building part I felt that it wasn’t quite evenly distributed throughout the group. Me and Esther were caught with a lot of the work and I think that this is where the communication could have been a little better because I think the rest of our group would have helped out more if they knew what they were supposed to do. I helped out with the puppet and the backdrop, and I could have done a better time if I had more time to get everything together. 

One of my key takeaways from this whole experience is that sometimes you will work your butt off to do something and it wont always pay off. Time and effort don’t always mean perfection. I have had a really hard time accepting that throughout life because whenever I put so much effort into something I expect so much out of it. A lot of the time I wont receive the outcome I want, and I think DI really showed me that that is ok. In the end I did enjoy different parts of this experience, and I made some friends throughout this process. I felt that this was really eye opening and I learned about my self and my capabilities, I grew as a learner and as a person.