What is destination imagination? That’s a complicated question, with a complicated answer. Destination imagination is a tournament in which different teams of students compete against each other in different categories. However, it feels like there’s a million regulations and tiny details to focus on. Working in groups can also be difficult, so this experience had lots of ups and downs. Come with me as I dive into the process of our regionals destination tournament, and the steps it took to get there.

Destination imagination, also known as DI, is a competition meant to let students think creatively to solve challanges. There are a number of different challenges, each with their own rules. The groups are randomly created, and even though you are allowed to make requests, nothing is garunteed. My group was assigned the engineering challenge, called High Wire Act. In this challenge, we had to create a transporter that would carry different weights up a rope. We had to encorporate this machine into a story that included a contemporary circus. To learn more about DI, click here.

When brainstorming ideas, my group decided to leave most of the design aspects to one of my group members, because he had a 3D printer, and had a ton of knowledge on engineering. Our first team choice element was a dance. We decided to choreograph a dance to the sone Circus by Britney Spears, because it felt very on point. More on that later. We also had something called a “daring display.” This was basically meant to be sort of a mock version of an act from a real contemporary circus. For this, we decided that two of our group members would lift a third into the air, and he would jump through a hoop. This took a TON of practice and trial and error, and was one of the more difficult parts of our performance to figure out. However, it was very successful in the end.

Our other main component was, of course, our story. We decided to do a circus full of older performers who weren’t sure whether they could continue to perform. I played the ringmaster, and I was trying to convince the rest of the circus that it was worth it to stay. We incorporated the machine into our show by saying “we should build a machine to do the work for us.” At the end of our story, we decided to keep the show on. Read the script here.

We had a few different challenges with our performance during regionals. The main two were our dance and our weights. Basically, for the engineering part of the challenge, we were supposed to have up to 6 weights, each up to 250 grams in weight. However, the person in my team in charge of that portion didn’t realize this, and instead brought two 1000 gram weights. This meant that in the 45 minutes before our performance, we had to create makeshift weights out of random items. This was incredibly tedious and difficult, but nothing brings a team together like being super stressed while doing something at the last minute.

Our second big challenge was the dance. Even though we spent the whole morning before the competition practicing our choreography, we didn’t connect the song to the speaker like we had planned. This meant that we had to do our dance, one of our main team choice elements, without any music. Even though it was a little bit embarrassing, I think this will help us remember to prep everything beforehand. A huge part of this going wrong was the fact that in the weeks leading up to DI, certain team members would decide to go MIA for a few days. This made it very difficult for everyone to be in the same place at the same time, which made it impossible to learn the dance, as it was a multiple person choreography.This sort of communication mishap is common, and is somewhat unavoidable in the competition.

To summarize, Destination Imagination this year was a challenge, in more than one way. My group’s communication errors and planning problems caused some issues. These issues were mainly caused by certain group members suddenly deciding to go MIA for a few days. However, we were able to pull ourselves together in time, and managed to get second place, mainly due to our machine’s performance. Thanks for reading, and have a great day!