Very recently we have just finished our regional tournament for Destination Imagination. This was our second and final tournament of the year and like the first one it went very well. All of the teams had strong performances and handled everything really well. This second tournament was very similar to the first one and only different in a few ways. One of these was how the time in between these tournaments was a time in which we could improve what we had already done.
Throughout this unit there were different things that we had to follow in iTunes U that would help us during our creation process. Stage 1 of this was to recognize. This stage was all about learning our challenge and what the requirements are for our challenge. This was the stage that started us off and really helped us get a good understanding of what we had to do. It was during this stage as well that we started to come up with some ideas that we would eventually use in our presentation.
Stage 2 was the stage that we started to get all of our ideas and solutions together. We started together all of the ideas that we had had previously and put them together in order to solve our challenge. At first we were very unorganized and were just throwing around loads of random ideas but in the end we got the best and crazy ones together and started to create the very beginning of our story. Once we had all of our ideas together we created a timeline of when we wanted everything done by and how we wanted it done. While we did not follow this as well as we would have liked to, everything got done in time and we completed everything by the first tournament. We did not create a second timeline between the first and second tournaments but there was not much that we wanted to fix so we got it done fairly easily.
Stage 3 was all about knowing what we needed to know and how we would get to know it. We got all of our previous ideas and started to figure what needed to be done for each part. Things like the ride and dancing were parts that we had to research and learn about a lot before we put them into our presentation. If we needed any help to learn a special skill or part of our presentation it was at this point that we really needed to learn it. This helped us with the learning process of this as it taught us new skills that would help us a lot in the future if the unit.
Stage 4 was our reviewing stage. This was closest to the end of the unit and we had most everything all done by this stage. We spent a lot of time reading through the script and rehearsing our presentation to find out everything that we could do better or improve. We changed a few parts of our script to make everything flow as smoothly as we could during our presentation at the tournaments. This stage was where we could really fine tune everything that we had worked on so far.
Finally it was time for stage 5 which is pretty much what this is right now. This has been the third year that we have done DI and every year it gets easier to do. We now know what we are doing and we get things done faster and better than we have in previous years. Getting this over with I was very relieved and proud if what we had accomplished during the whole thing. My group performed really well together and it showed in our final results as a team. All of the other groups performed well together and the whole class was very happy with how their projects turned out. I am not sure if we are doing DI again next year but if we are I am sure we will do a very good job again and again.
As part of this final Blogpost we were tasked with reading an article about DI. This article basically states that the students who participate in DI are more creative and have more advanced problem solving skills. I think that most people do things that they are good at and DI is no exception. People who do DI enjoy it and that means that they do better in their work, the same goes for athletes and sports.