Recently our PLP program competed in the provincial tournament of Destination Imagination. This was our third year competing and I think my team definitely “Ended on a High Note”, coming in second place in the fine arts challenge. Although there were only 4 teams competing in our challenge in our age group, 2nd was still good considering only 2 of our 4 group members were actually competing at provincials.
PLP Grade 8s and 10s
I unfortunately wasn’t able to compete at provincial because I had a provincial qualifying volleyball tournament I needed to go to that I already committed to. One of our other group members Robbie also wasn’t able to be there as he had shooting provincials. This made it quite difficult when coming up with a solution to solve our challenge while still keeping our story and a similar presentation to Regionals.
Regionals preparation
During the Regional tournament our team placed first in both our instant challenges and the main challenge for Fine Arts. This Fine Arts challenge was called change of Tune and presented us with the challenge of creating a 2 act musical with a spectacle and a set change. Our story was a grumpy business person who was unhappy with his job so the ghost of music past shows him the magic of music with a blast from the past. Our story was then taken back to the 60s where we showed our understanding and research. We did this by including things in our story such as the hippie movement, the summer of love, different dance moves and music. Also we wrote all our own music to create a story that was comedic and enjoyable for the audience to watch. If you want to learn more about the regional tournament then check out my blog post on the whole experience here.
Our team was really proud of the final result of the regional tournament but the next step was to figure out how were going to deal with the issue of only having 2 group performers. After discussing we realized the first step was we would need to work on editing our script. We all were trying hard to brainstorm ways to keep this same story with the script but it was extremely hard to do so as we were loosing two people who could perform, help with set up, set change and anything really during the performance. As Robbie was our main during Regionals we wanted to still incorporate him as a major role in the performance by creating a robot for his ghosts of music past character. We would have done this by prerecording him on the iPad then creating a body for the iPad to be held up by. This idea wasn’t the best and most of us agreed we could come up with a better one by brainstorming again and putting our heads together.
We came up with the solution of having Hannah play the character Robbie was playing and Lucas would stay as the grumpy business person. However we decided we needed an extra touch to this solution so we decided Hannah would be performing as two characters. How might we do this you ask? Well it’s not a normal costume change that’s for sure! We decided Hannah would be representing two characters by having one side of her one character, and the other side a different character. To make sure we represented the two characters in the best way possible we decided to create our own costume by sewing two different outfits together. Our two characters being represented were a business women and a hippie. We went to value village to buy a top and pants we could use for the business side of the costume. Then we would attach and sew that to our hippie costume we decorated and picked out for our Regional performance.
Sewing the costume
After we had all the articles of clothing Hannah and I started piecing them together, by sewing one half of the business shirt to the other half of the hippie shirt. After getting the hang of it as I haven’t done sewing in a while it was quite easy and pretty fun to do. It became a little more difficult when sewing the pants as it was two different materials but once we measured how much to cut from each and did adjustments the costume tuned out great! The final and I think most difficult part of the costume though was definitely attaching two different pairs of glasses together. However after many many failed attempts of glueing and wire we finally attached two different pairs of glasses together!
As I wasn’t going to be performing during provincials I decided I needed to do as much as possible to help Lucas and Hannah prepare for their performance. To do this we practiced after school, and I helped them by timing their performance and giving their lines to them when they forgot. After much practice by Saturday i think they were ready to perform and I was cheering them on all the way from volleyball in Victoria.
Here is the performance:
https://youtu.be/NO-BeQcQU84
I am very proud of my group and our final result, I definitely think we overcame the challenges that were thrown at us and came up with great solutions that got us second place. I think this was definitely although us PLP students don’t admit it a great experience that will definitely help in my future years of school and life in general.
Destination Imagination has thought me so much from team work and collaborating with others to time management and problem solving. I definitely think that over these past couple of years DI has helped me a lot with PLP projects and vice versa. Instant challenges especially have helped me with quick thinking skills and thinking outside the box. It’s actually been proven that 86% of students are better collaborators after participating in DI for 2 years. I definitely think these statistics are true and apply to our class.
https://www.destinationimagination.org/proven-results/
Although this is probably my last year participating in Destination Imagination I know I’m going to take everything I’ve leaned to the next step in my life and onwards. As well as my growth as a learner in many areas I never even knew I could improve upon, From a school project to when I get a job and have to collaborate with others DI I will use what I’ve learned from these experiences.