(Insert Improvised Blog Post Here)

Hello, Internet.

So you might remember that a while back we hosted the regional Destination Imagination tournament, in which I took part in the improvisational challenge. Last weekend, it came time for the provincial tournament.

 

In the gap between regionals and provincials, my team decided to give a lot of focus to learning more about our list of explorers, two of which we would have to integrate into our final improv skit. (The gist of the challenge was this: you’re given two explorers and one “cultural treasure” from a list, and you have to make a skit about the explorers recovering the treasure. The whole thing takes place in an unusual setting which you are also given at the start of the skit. Partway through the skit, you are also given a random setback to incorporate. The only prop you are allowed is a single white bedsheet) Not knowing enough about our explorers was an area where we felt that we really fell short in our first performance, so we wanted to make sure we all really knew who our explorers were.

 

Our full list of explorers was as follows:

 

Ann Bancroft , a skier who skied through both the arctic and Antarctic (not to be confused with Anne Bancroft, the actress from The Graduate)

Jacques Cousteau , the coinventor of the aqualung.

Captain Kidd, a Scottish sailor.

Leif Ericson, the Viking who discovered North America.

Howard Carter , the man who found King Tut’s tomb.

Katherine Johnson , a black woman who was a computer for NASA.

John James Audubon , an ornithologist and the author of Birds of America.

Elon Musk , the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla.

Captain Nemo , the protagonist of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Ruth Benedict , an American anthropologist.

Blackbeard (Edward Teach), a famous pirate.

Alice, the protagonist of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

 

Unfortunately, half my team was unable to be there, so despite having prepared more thouroughly for provincials than regionals, we went into our second tournament with significantly less confidence. This turned out to be reasonable, as we ended up coming in fifth place out of five.

This means that we can’t progress to the next round of DI (Globals), so this is our final round of DI for this year.

Now, DI is a good chance to do a lot of critical thinking, and it can be a good way to develop certain skills. I’ve been regularly participating in DI for a few years now, and I always find it to be a challenge, and something that requires lots of work, thinking and effort on the part of the students participating. We looked at a study showing that students who participated in DI were more engaged, better collaborators, more self confident, and more creative (among other things) than those who didn’t, and DI definitely requires you to use skills in all these areas. However, all the attributes mentioned above seem to me like things that people would already have to possess in order to be interested in DI and successfully complete a challenge, and in our case, they seem like attributes necessary to get into PLP.

 

From my my own experience, I would say a skill that DI helps you (or at least helped me) develop is commitment to and throughout something frustrating or difficult. For instance, the first time I did DI my group struggled to think of ideas for some of the requirements, which were much more specific than we were used to, and we had to work through arguments and a lot of fruitless brainstorming until we eventually worked out an idea.

 

In fact, the whole “requirements being more specific” thing brings me to another skill that DI helped me develop: reading long, important, confusing, and very specific documents and interpreting the information in a useful way. Reading the rules for our first ever challenge felt a bit like trying to actually read the terms and conditions before using an app or other software, but as I already mentioned, it eventually became important to read and understand them– and we did it. We went through and highlighted important things, moved pages into different apps so we could read smaller sections without it being so overwhelming, made notes paraphrasing important information as we went so we could keep track of it, and basically any other techniques we could think of (using our aforementioned creativity and critical thinking), and we developed a skill that we weren necessarily already strong at.

 

To summarize, I think the skills that DI helps you build are somewhat misconstrued; sure, it can help develop the skills and attributes you already have as strengths, but what it does more is force you to pick up whatever new skills happen to be necessary to your challenge (for instance, we all learned improv!) by making you commit even when it gets difficult– and that can be extremely important.

 

Anyway, I won’t make this blog post so long and confusing it feels like reading terms and conditions.

 

 

Toodles.

 

(Insert Awesome Improvisation Here)

Hello, Internet.

So we’re in the midst of another round of Destination Imagination . I’m doing improv again this year, but this time around it’s themed around explorers . The gist of the challenge is that we had to research a bunch of different explorers, ranging from fictional explorers to space explorers to just plain old traditional explorers, and a set of “cultural treasures” and then make an improv skit incorporating a random two explorers and one cultural treasure.

 

The explorers that I researched were Alice Liddle (from Alice in Wonderland), Jacques Cousteau, and Howard Carter. These were the notes I took on them:

 

Alice (from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through The Looking Glass)
(treasure: the books)
– 7 years old
– Mid-Victorian era
– Alice Liddell
– May have been loosely based on the real Alice Liddell, the daughter of a friend of Lewis Carroll’s
– Older sister
– Pet cat (Dinah)
– Adventurous, kind, smart, questions authority
– High social standing
– Appears in: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, various cartoons, Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, and two live action movies created by Tim Burton

Jacques Cousteau (Artifact: Aqua lung):
– French explorer
– Naval officer
– Researcher
– Co-developed the aqua lung
– Studied the sea + marine life
– Lived 1910-1997
– Started in naval aviation but was unable to continue after being hurt in a car accident
– Wrote books on his marine research
– Pioneered marine conservation

Howard Carter (Artifact: Tutankhamun):
– British archeologist
– Discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb
– Egyptologist
– Lived 1874-1939
– Born in Kensington
– After retiring from archeology, worked part time as an agent for museums

 

The other explorers that we had to learn about were Ann Bancroft, Leif Ericsson, Captain Kidd, Ruth Benedict, Katherine Johnson, John Audborn, Elon Musk, Blackbeard, and Captain Nemo. For each explorer that we researched, we chose a corresponding cultural treasure: not literal treasure, but an artifact that was/is important to the culture the explorer came from, and is somehow related to each explorer.

Along with integrating the explorers and treasure, we were also given a weird setting for our skit to take place in (our setting ended up being a department store perfume department, which we ended up narrowing down to a singular bottle of perfume), and we were given a setback to incorporate partway through the performance (in which the perfume bottle started filling up with mud. For some reason.).

 

When we weren’t researching, we prepared by trying to learn how to do improv. We had an improv lesson during one of our flex blocks, and we spent a lot of time working through improv games and scenarios, and then through versions of the requirements for the end skit.

 

After months of preparation, we attended the regional tournament, convienently located at our school. We performed our skit, featuring me and Sydney as unsuspecting department store patrons who got put in a perfume bottle, Kyle as Elon Musk, and Ethan as the ghost of Ruth Benedict.

 

 

Once our performance was finished, the judges decided on our raw scores, which would eventually lead to deciding how well we did against the other teams, and whether we could continue to provincials. Our raw scores were as follows:

As for how we stacked up against the other teams? Well…

We got first place! We actually came in first for both our team challenge and our instant challenge, meaning that we’ll definitely be advancing to provincials.

Before we do go to provincials, however, we have some more work to do, so we took the time to reflect on what we thought we did well, what we should work on, and what will get us the most points.

Now, I’ve got to go get started preparing for provincials.

 

Toodles.

This Team Is Choice

So, you may remember me mentioning Destination Imagination ?

If you don’t remember me mentioning Destination Imagination, you can go check out my previous blog post about it or even my post recounting my first time doing DI.

On the off chance that you now still have no idea what Destination Imagination is, let me recap:

Destination Imagination is essentially a series of tournaments in which teams, representing schools from elementary to university levels, have to compete in various challenges. Each team has a main challenge, which they get to select from a list of options, and an “instant challenge”, which is given to them on the day of the tournament. The main challenge is generally something that takes a lot of preparation and development of ideas over time, while the instant challenge is generally something that requires quick thinking, teamwork and logic.

The main challenge that my team (Kate, Angela, Robbie, Claire and myself) did actually required both. Our challenge was this: present three skits, with three minutes to prepare and present each one, all based on the same prompt but with a different genre and stock character each time. To assist us in our skits, we were allowed to bring a 13″ x 13″ x 13″ box of props. We had some restrictions with the props, such as not being allowed to bring anything that would ruin the stage if it got knocked over, but for the most part we could bring whatever we thought would be helpful.

We also had to include two “team choice elements”: things that represented our collective interests as a group. These elements had to be well-incorporated into our presentations, while still clearly accentuated.

When I wrote my last blog post about DI, we had just finished the regional tournament, and gotten first place due to being the only team in our category and age group. We were feeling pretty good about the performance we had given, but there were some things we wanted to improve on.

The first thing we wanted to improve upon was one of our team choice elements. The idea for this team choice element was to handcraft one of our props out of (homemade play dough). However, the prop we made for regionals didn’t hold together very well.

So, we decided to try again. This time, however, instead of making a specific prop, we would just make some play dough and keep it mold-able for the tournament so that we could make whatever prop we needed on the spot. Besides the interests that we had initially wanted to represent– spacial-visual skills, science and art –we now also had to utilize the same creativity and quick thinking that we were already using to improvise our skits.

The second thing we wanted to improve upon was our understanding of the stock characters and genres that we could potentially be given for our skits. For the provincial tournament, we had a different set of potential stock characters than the ones we had for regionals. We used the preparation time we had between tournaments to practice improv skits with these characters, and changing our box of props to suit the characters we were now using.

Eventually, the day of provincials arrived, and we performed our three skits. They all went fairly well, but I think the first one (prompt: the stock character is working in a car dealership, stock character: royal person, genre: parody) went best. I had some technical issues trying to download the videos of our skits, so I can’t include them here until further notice, but watching them back I felt that this was the skit where we had the most energy and confidence. This probably stemmed partly from the fact that we chose to parody Keeping Up With the Kardashians, seeing as we had been including Kim Kardashian in our skits from pretty much the very beginning of this project.

If I have to do DI again next year, I think I’ll probably do improv again, as I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed DI last year. I also feel like I’ve learned a lot about how to improvise skits during this project, so it would be interesting to do again with some preexisting improv ability.

Toodles!

Oh, A Blog Post Title? I’ll Improvise Something…

So, about a year ago, I wrote this post about Destination Imagination. Destination Imagination is essentially an organization that presents groups of students from different schools around the world with “challenges” of some kind– I.e. writing a skit or creating a transportation device –with a lot of specific rules and instructions.

The challenge I decided to do this year was the improvisational challenge: create three skits, with three minutes to prep and present each, all based around the same prompt but with a different genre and including a different stock character each time.

Because it was improv, we wouldn’t get assigned our prompt, genre and character until right before our three minutes began. However, we were given a list of all the possible characters, which we divided up between the five of us, and we were asked to choose fifteen genres off of a list (which I was really glad we were allowed to narrow down, as I was not confident in our ability to improv a kabuki skit).

What we were allowed to choose ahead of time was our box of props (officially called a “box o stuff”). We were required to bring a 13″ x 13″ x 13″ box containing all of our props, including any accessories we wanted to involve in the skits. Our box of props included a wig, some faks glasses, various fake weapons, some plastic food, a foam microphone, fake flowers, a flute, and a melted fake gem, among other things.

But let me talk specifically about those last two. As part of our challenge, we had to create two “team choice elements”: things that reflected our interests and abilities as a group. Our first team choice element consisted of musical cues played on a flute, representing my group’s interest in music, and specifically in learning to play musical instruments. Our second tesm choice element was a little more ambiguous; what was intended to be a fake diamond made out of a playdough-like substance (representing our creativity and tendency towards visual or special learning) ended up melting and becoming a miscellaneous prop that we had to learn to incorporate into different situations and use as different things. Unfortunately, we didn’t really do much to make this team choice element stand out, and I’m honestly not sure it was really clear what it was supposed to be.

Our second team choice element probably falls under the category of Stuff We Have to Improve For Provincials.

That’s right. We’re going to the second round of competition of Destination Imagination. Which makes sense, seeing as during regionals we came in first place in our age group and category.

Tag yourself, I’m the excited child wearing muggle clothes.

…We were the only team in our age group and category, so we came in first place by default, but that’s just a technicality.

Anyway, so we’re going to provincials. Look out for that blog post as a follow up sometime soon. Until then, however…

Toodles.

Panic! At the Disco

So, for the past month or so we’ve been working on this thing called D.I. Apparently it doesn’t stand for Dying Inside like some people thought, but, rather, for Destination Imagination. D.I. involved a variety of challenges, and culminated in the sacrifice of a Saturday.

Though different people did different challenges, my group (of six, although the numbers varied) were mainly working out a murder. Mystery. We were working out a murder mystery. In which I played the detective, and we were all in the 1970s panicking at the disco. The actual murder was fairly simple; a disco ball had been shot, fallen on a man’s head, and killed him (I’m not so sure about the validity of this plan, but hey, you can’t expect us to be experts at murder plots…). What made it complicated was that we needed a “techniclue”, a clue that we could use to solve the mystery through technical methods, and we weren’t sure what to do. After a lot of uninspired days trying to think, a couple arguments, and some experimentation with different potential clues, we went with the classic: fingerprinting.
Now you might be saying, what was there to fingerprint in this mystery? The object that killed the man was shot. So we had to add in an extra detail, in this case the fact that the killer had also stolen (and then dropped) the victim’s wedding ring, presumably to sell.
I got to fingerprint all the suspects, which was cool because I’ve never fingerprinted anyone before. I think the ring got lost during our actual performance so that wasn’t so good, but it wasn’t super important anyways. We eventually scored a little over 50% of the total score we could have had, maybe 53% or so, which we were told was quite good for our first time doing D.I.
Now that was only half of what we had to do at the tournament. The other half was called an Instant Challenge, and it was an eight minute challenge we had to complete as a team, and although I’m not allowed to tell you what ours was, I can say that one of the practice challenges we did was building a tower out of paper. So that sort of physical but also logical challenge. We scored 100% on our Instant Challenge, so I’d say we did fairly well…
I will further update this post with pictures and/or videos later on, once I have better access to them.
Toodles

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