Destination Imagination

/ˌdestəˈnāSHən / /iˌmajəˈnāSH(ə)n/

Noun

A nonprofit with the goal of increasing the next generation’s creative and critical thinking, collaboration, and idea generation skills.

”Sorry bro I gotta do my Destination Imagination homework.”

Similar: PLP’s biggest barrier, The Most Stressful Project

As you might be able to guess from title, this blog post is about DI, or Destination Imagination, which is a nonprofit, whose website is here, where they run competitions to train children’s creative and critical thinking etc. My specific challenge was Fine Arts, if you want to hear about other perspectives and challenges, check out my friends Matteo and Finn and their blogs which are posted here and here respectively.

The fine arts challenge is called “In Motion,” and there are a few aspects to it, those being, kinetic art (art that moves due to a technical method), performance art, reimagined art, as well as two team choice elements, which can be anything that any one of the group members are interested in/relate to.

Okay, reflection time.

This is a bit tricky, because I can’t reveal too much because there’s still DI provincials, but here we go.

The most important thing I can talk about is the group dynamic, or in other words, who was helpful who wasn’t. This was definitely a big part of DI, as we talked about this quite a bit leading up to regionals, but now we’re past regionals, so we have a sort of set metric of who is doing what. Seeing how everything is about me, I’m going to start with myself. To be honest, I am unsatisfied with my placement in our group dynamic. I was definitely helpful, but I didn’t do as much as I could’ve, and my communication was quite lacking. I could’ve, and should’ve, done a better job of checking basecamp for meetings, because I missed the first one, and I was late to the second.

I want to preface talking about my group with who I worked with. I worked with Nikan, Sofia, Hunter, Alva, and Jesse, and you can check out their blogs by clicking their names.

To start, one person specifically took a big leader role, and had a hand in pretty much every decision. This person was super helpful, and fun to work with, I want to work with them again. The next person was helpful and took another important role. I’ve worked with this person a few times before, and I really enjoy it. They have a good sense of time and place, and when is a good time to joke around, and when isn’t. Again, I would love to work with this person again. Next we get to “no man’s land” this person was really good at being at team meetings, and also helped with a secondary role. They got work done consistently, and weren’t terrible to work with. I wouldn’t mind working with this person again. I would squeeze myself in right about here. Next we have the second to last person. This person didn’t do much in class, but they had a tertiary role of sorts that they did well on, and helped out making some of the props. Finally, we have the last person. They didn’t finish work they said they would, I didn’t see them at any team meetings, and I didn’t see them during school. I honestly don’t want to work with this person again, unless they step their game up.

Okay, so all in all, my group wasn’t as bad as described by other PLP students, but how was my actual experience?

Our final presentation went quite well, but we need to revise our kinetic art, which I can’t really go into detail on, but it definitely has a lot to improve on. We also relied a lot on the second person to improvise many scenes, which was mainly due to the kinetic art. We also should work on our instant challenges as we scored a bit below average in the instant challenge.

All that being said, we still ended up placing third overall at regionals, which I’m pretty proud of.

So in summary, my group needs to work on our kinetic art and teamwork in instant challenges to see bigger success in provincials, and I need to be better with helping out more, seeing as I haven’t helped enough so far.

Thanks for reading.