The Finale of The Grade 8 Improvers of DI

Hello everyone!

This is my second blog post about Destination Imagination (DI). We’re finally done, after a lot of work we finally went to the competition and presented our challenge solution. If your looking at your screen and wondering “what is this lady talking about?” Visit my previous DI post here. Ok now that your all caught up it’s time to wrap this project up for this year (because we do DI till grade 10).

So as you most likely know I was a part of one (of the two) improv groups, our team name was ‘Operation: Unplanned’ and unlike the last post I can finally talk about my challenge solution because I’ve presented it. Unfortunately I can’t talk about my. Instant challenge till sometime in may because if I do I risk disqualification for my team which would not be good.

This post is gonna wrap up my experience with DI and what I’ve learned through it and how I’ve grown as a learner. In this post I’m going to talk about how I contributed to my team to create our final solution. At the end of this post I’ll have a YouTube video of my challenge solution. I’m also going to be talking about the process that my team and I went through to have a successful first DI year.

My Teammates

I wanted to include a link to my teammates blog’s so you can check our all their work.

My teammates are:

We had a pretty small group but it was fine because the less people you have in improv the easier it is.

What I’ve Learned

I think one of the main things I’ve learned through DI this year has been that when you work with people for something like this you need to get to know each other and set boundaries with your teammates because if you don’t then thing become chaotic. I think that me and my team should’ve made more of an effort to actually get to know each other because it’s so important when improving to know who your working with and how they do things.

Another thing I didn’t really learn but kind of reinforced is that organization is SUPER important I don’t think my team would’ve made it to the end if we didn’t organize our thoughts and physical things (who’s driving, who’s brining boxes…). Organization is 100% something that I’m brining into next years DI.

My Growth

DI has forced me out of my comfort zone sometimes this year and it was a little scary sometimes because I didn’t always know what was happening. If you know me then you probably know that I like to control pretty everything but for DI this year sometimes I had to relinquish that control and I think that’s helped me really grow as a learner because now I know that I don’t have to micro manage everything for things to workout.

What Did I Contribute To My Team?

I think I contributed my organizational skills and my previous knowledge of improv to my team. Even though it was a team effort I think I took the head of keeping our basecamp organized, I made sure things were in the right folders and that we had all the documents we needed at the end of the day. I also brought my previous improv knowledge because through my years in acting I’ve done many improv games so I tried to help us get into the improv spirit whenever we were rehearsing.

The skills I mentioned helped us during our solution because since we were so organized we didn’t need to do anything last minute at the tournament and also since we had practiced our improv skills we were ready to do some improv at the tournament.

Our Process

We basically had the same first steps as the other teams because everyone was still trying to figure out what their challenge was and everything about it here were the major steps we took to have an amazing challenge solution:

We learned about our challenge.

We memorized our rules.

Practiced instant challenges.

Communicated as a team.

Rehearsed our scenes.

We had an organized Basecamp.

We brainstormed ideas.

We came prepared to dress rehearsals.

We figured out how we were gonna get to the challenge.

We went to the tournament!

Our Solution!

This is our final challenge solution. As I mentioned earlier I’m not allowed to share details of our instant and people weren’t even allowed to view it so I don’t hav a video of it but this is our challenge solution that we’d been work to for a while. So without further ado Operation’s a-go🤜