Hello friends, and welcome back to my blog! This post is a follow-up to my other post about a certain special thing called Destination Imagination. Just to reiterate, Destination Imagination is a tournament that takes place worldwide for school kids from kindergarten to university. Before this tournament, teams are presented challenges that they have to build, act out and create solutions for in many different ways. These challenges are usually creativity-centred and encourage one to use many different innovative methods to come up with solutions. “It’s an opportunity to enhance one’s skills in a variety of subjects (science, the arts, engineering, etc.), display multiple forms of deep thought and creativity, build working machines and sets, perform, and to get inspired by the creations of others just like yourself, working towards the same goals under the same standards.” (This is just an excerpt from what I wrote in my last DI post.) 

There are different levels in Destination Imagination— first there were Regionals, and then Provincials. This post is about my experience at Provincials! I won’t give a play-by-play of what happened during the day, but I’ll try to talk about the improvements that my team made since Regionals and what I’ve gained from the experience. 

The challenge that my team (Izzy, Gabby, Aiden and Luciano) took on was the Improvisational challenge, which entailed preparing for an improvised skit including two of ten possible significant figureheads on coins around the world, hence the challenge being called “Heads Up!”. Again, check out my previous post about Regionals if you want to know the specifics; I go into more detail about the challenge there. Preparing ten characters required a lot of studying beforehand, rehearsing, and characterization of these figureheads— of course, us having to act them out in a scenario meant that we had to develop some sort of personality for them. When it came time to perform at Regionals, we hadn’t practiced too much, and one of the characters was especially problematic as we knew very little about it. This was our biggest downfall. When it came time to perform, that exact character that we hadn’t practiced nearly enough was chosen at random! It was quite difficult to incorporate facts or characterization of this certain figurehead into our story because we knew so little about it. I was the one who ended up having to play this character as well. Our actual performance was pretty mediocre, and we received some feedback from one of the “appraisers” (judges) that we needed to incorporate the characters more into the story. On top of that we also had the chance to see our raw scores, which were categorized, so we could see which sections were most important for us to improve on. We ended up placing in second at Regionals. 

Now that Regionals were over, we had time to reflect on what we needed to focus on. Provincials were about a month after Regionals, and unfortunately one of our group members Aedan was unable to attend Provincials. He was also away the week before Provincials after Spring Break ended, so we had time to rehearse without him and adjust to him not being here. I think this is when we most improved; we put in a good amount of decent rehearsals and actually got some skills and revision ideas under our belts. We were able to practice every single character, go through multiple scenarios, try switching genres accordingly, and we even played a bit of charades to work on our ability to convey a message non-verbally. We were pretty psyched by the day of Provincials because we actually had put in the time and work to fine-tune our skills and performance. 

Our performance at Provincials went very well! Our two figureheads were Queen Elizabeth and Athena. The queen was played by Gabby and I played Athena. Our scenario was along the lines of “the Figureheads are gathering wool”. Izzy became the narrator, and Luciano was the sheep that we were gathering wool from! We also got the comedy genre first, which was lucky because it is a lot easier to act out the comedy verbally compared to the tragedy, in my opinion. We had a concise story with a beginning, middle and end, and we sprinkled in facts about each figurehead accordingly. I thought we did quite well, and we were all proud of our performance. 

As you can see, this is a comparison between our scores at Regionals and our scores at Provincials! We improved in every single category. The main reason I think we did better was the large amount of practice that we put in before Provincials, compared to Regionals where we put in almost no practice. We had been warming up for the performance for a week before it actually happened; we were confident in our roles and ready to take on whatever story we were given. We ended up getting 2nd place! I’m so proud of everyone in my team for making that possible. I know we also got second place at Regionals, but this meant a lot more as we were versing more teams and it had gone a lot better than our Regionals performance had. 

For future DI’s, I’ve learned a lot from this one; practice makes perfect. Put in the effort and you will achieve what you desire! I can’t wait until next year when I can put everything I’ve learned from this experience into another Destination Imagination challenge. I’ve sure learned a fair bit.