Hello people. I just did my first ever DI tournament. Wooooo. Yeah. DI stands for Destination Imagination, and it’s this global event that happens every year. Students from all over the world come to compete in a tournament. Competitors are given a challenge, and we’d have to come up with a solution in a team. There are different challenges too because there are different categories. We did four of them, which was scientific, engineering, technical, and fine arts. There was around five teams and one team manager, who were the PLP teachers, in each category.

All this is pretty scary huh. Yeah I was really scared. For many reasons.

1. We (as in all the teams that are in this school) were given a lot less time to complete this challenge than probably everyone else who were doing it.
2. I am not a person that performs well under stress, and a lot less time meant that I was really stressed.
3. I was really anxious. Why? Because we had to perform our solution to the challenge in front of a crowd, and I get really anxious whenever I have to do something in front of other people.
4. There was a lot that had to be done in order for us to have a completed solution by the regionals tournament, which was on March 2.
5. We had to work in a team of random people and I really don’t like meeting new people. It scares me. I get anxious and I never know what to say to them. Also I don’t really work well as a team member because then I rely too much on my teammates and I do less.

Other than those I was fine with doing DI, like I know I said that I don’t like performing in front of a crowd, but I do like acting and stuff like theatre. Also I get to spill out some of my creativity for others to see, so I like these two aspects of DI, as well as some other ones.

We first known that we were going to do DI in like October or early November, but when we finally got our teams and started to actually work on it was already like mid December, meaning we had just a little more than two months to finish this. I got the scientific category and my team had five people. Luca, Kaia, Alex, Evelyn, and me. Big thanks to them for being good teammates. I was afraid that this group might be a little shaky, but like after we got to know each other a little better and worked together on some stuffs, it felt like an actual team.

The planning and coming up with the solution to the challenge had to be done pretty fast. We also had to know the rules, learn what the challenge is about, and what we’re suppose to do. We did all that before winter break. The next two months went by as we were dividing up roles to work on things, meeting and deciding on some more things, and building  and getting all the necessary things for our performance. Props, costumes, the puppet, etc.

The challenge was about archeology, where we have to discover an artifact using an archeological investigation and the artifact has to lead to a finding. We also have to include a character from the past, and that character has to be a puppet. We decided our big finding would be Atlantis, and then everything else just sorta fell into place. I think coming up with the archeological investigation was the hardest part, because we chose our artifact first, so we were limited to only a few one. The archeological investigation that we ended up doing was also kinda hard to show, like I didn’t really understand it, and neither did they. Plus, everything felt kinda rushed, and our puppet wasn’t looking too good either, but there was no time left, and it was time for the tournament.

Day of Tournament

Saturday March 2, 2024 marked the day of the DI regionals tournament. Surprisingly, Seycove, the school that I go to, is hosting the event. We have a pretty small school, so I didn’t think it’s be happening here. Anyways, I went to the prepping room, and because our presentation wasn’t until later in the day, we had some time to finish up a few things. We did have our instant challenge pretty early on though, but I think my team did pretty darn good. But yeah, afterwards, we tied up some loose ends in our performance, and finally, it was time to present our solution.

It went pretty smoothly…all the way until the performance that is. I messed up big time by forgetting my lines, and we skipped over an entire section. It was pretty important too cuz it was the part of my actually doing the archeological investigation. I really don’t know what happened, because I had everything memorized, but as soon as I got up on stage and started to perform, my mind went blank. I just couldn’t remember what I was going to say. I had an important role in it as well. I was the archeologist. The guy who’s going to help the treasure hunters fix the map and find the lost city of Atlantis.

Everything else went okay though. That was the only part that went wrong. I thought we did well on everything else, but it wasn’t good enough, as we placed 4th. I was really disappointed, and I felt like it was my fault. Because I forgot my lines, the archeological investigation got skipped, and we didn’t get a lot of points for that.

If given the opportunity to do it again, I probably wouldn’t unless there was more time given to us and get to work with people that I know. Anyways yeah. Thats the DI regionals tournament. Hopefully the Provincials tournament will be better.