You’re in the Amazon, on a hunt for the sacred tombstone of Guacs.

Or at least that’s where I was on Saturday during our DI presentation here at Seycove Destination Imagination regionals. Through a lot of work, we finally made it to our first public presentation,

DI is a global competition for people from pre-K to university age. Through a competition of our central challenge (the same for everyone) and the instant challenges (shhhhhhh). Our central challenge was scientific and we had to create a story about an archeological investigation and make a puppet that was a character from the past.

Another vital part of DI is teamwork. This is most likely the most difficult part of it. I didn’t know anyone in my group beforehand which made it hard to be confident in my ideas, especially when certain group members weren’t receptive to other opinions. It’s really hard to work with other people! Communicating seems so easy but it’s not.

Know that I know my group members better I feel much more prepared. throughout getting ready for the regional tournament I found myself prompting group members to get the bare minimum required for our solution. I noticed how this affected my own life in and outside of school and stressed me out. Constantly coaxing people to do stuff is hard ! (How our teachers do it all the time is beyond me). Because of this as we go into preparations for nationals I have decided for my well-being to stop chasing so much. In the end, I did not get much done when I did it and it wasn’t my responsibility to remind my teammates of every deadline and thing they had to do because they couldn’t do it.

This said many of my teammates were amazing! Bobby came over to work on stuff and responded to messages very fast with a positive attitude that I was really happy to be around. Brooke and Meghan stepped up after not being able to attend our first dress rehearsal coming to tutorial early with Bobby and me to get everything done. Meghan rewrote our script which meant the WORLD and Brooke wrote an epic bass part to accompany our story.

I don’t know why that’s upside down.

On the day of the competition we all came together once, and everyone realized how real it was. We did many successful run-throughs ironing out little details. Then we had our actual performance and instant challenge (shhhh I’ll talk about that later). Our performance went well and we got 3rd at the awards ceremony.

Through all of this, I learned a lot about balance, teamwork and collaboration which I will apply to later. My 3 goals for myself going to nationals are to:

Communicate all progress clearly often and effectively
Organize at least 2 out of school meetings
Use the Kanban board so everyone can visually see who has to do what in our Basecamp

Until next time!
Neko