Hey guys! Welcome back to my blog. Today I’m going to be talking about Destination Imagination! I had the scientific challenge, which was called Up Close.

My team included Caden, Kadin, Owen, Jackson, and Naomi.

The Up Close challenge required quite a few things, but mainly for there to be a story in which character(s) go into a microworld and discover a mysterious object, and later learning what it is (this is a rough explanation.)

In my team (Bacterial Besties)’s solution, we had 2 scientists fall into the microworld and meet our three bacteria, who’s names were Sal, Mon, and Ella (to be salmonella.) The scientists met the bacteriophage, figured out what it was, and used it to kill the bacteria, before leaving the microworld.

When we started working on ideas, we had pretty much nothing. We had barely any ideas, only that we would have scientists fall into the microworld through a microscope. As we continued to work on it, we began to come up with more ideas, such as the bacteriophage and it having moving legs. Eventually, we had a full plan and began to write the script. Once we had a pretty good script, we started building things, such as the microscope. When we went to Loon Lake, we finalized the script, and when we got back, we built the backdrop. As we put together our costumes and started rehearsing with our backdrop, it fell apart, so we rebuilt it, and our entire presentation was already looking much better than before. Eventually, we memorized lines and went to St. George’s to present our solution.

I think our presentation went okay, though I think we could’ve improved by delivering our lines more smoothly. It seemed a bit too awkward, and we weren’t in sync. We also would’ve done better if we started building the bacteriophage costume earlier on. Because we built it so last minute, it was almost falling apart while we were presenting, and it wasn’t fully functional. I think if we had also put more effort into it, we definitely would’ve done better.

One thing I think we did really well was our backdrop. When it broke the first time, we were sad, but we went back at it with a proper plan, and it turned out so much better. We also did pretty good with the backdrop transition while presenting, doing it smoothly and efficiently without and bumps of hitches. I also think we did pretty well on our instant challenge.

There was also a photo we had to take of our car decorated by our team! This was ours:

The big sign that says “bacterial besties” was our team sign.

And finally, here’s a video of our presentation:

Thank you for reading my blog post. DI really pushed me out of my comfort zone, but it was totally worth it because of all the ways I grew along the way.