D.I. Say these two letters to any PLP student and a wave of memories will come back. These two letters stand for Destination Imagination, and it is something every PLP student does throughout their time in high school. Well, its that time again. DI has crossed PLP 9’s path once more, and it was an interesting time this year.
Lets start with what my challenge was this year. My group was Alex, Kaden, Ally, Meg, and Julia. Our challenge was the scientific challenge. More specifically, First Encounter. Our challenge was to recreate the first encounter of an outsider species and a habitat. We must show a morph in the habitat and the outside species that is directly related to the first encounter. Our outsider species was a black mamba, and we finally settled on the forested Savannah in Florida for our habitat.
Our first milestone for DI 2020 was to identify the above. We would just figure out all the different challenge requirements, and try to learn our challenge inside out. This helped us transition into our second milestone, defining our teams deliverables. This helped us narrow down any ideas we had at the start for any of the challenge requirements. Milestone three was determining responsibilities and roles within the team. This kind of got everyone organized. We now knew what we wanted to do, we just needed a way to do it.
My group ended up deciding on a black mamba entering a forested savannah for the first time. We began to research for a reason for why the mamba ended up in this habitat, and we learned that forested palm rats were abundant in the area. Forested palm rats are part of the same group of animals that black mambas generally feed on. So we decided that palm rats had overrun the population in Florida, which was our setting, and that a black mamba had to be sent into the area to help control the overpopulation of palm rats.
My group spent a lot of time at school outside of school hours. I think this really helped with our setting, which was one of the strongest parts of our presentation. We had 3 to 4 people stay after school to work on the setting and props almost every night until 6 or 7 pm.
As I mentioned before, the palm rats were overpopulating the area. Since the palm rats like to eat seeds, trees were not able to grow, and the existing trees were dying off. This was perfect inspiration for our habitat morph. Our plan was that after our black mamba had successfully balanced the population, (spoilers) a tree would rise up out of a rock we had decided to plant in the middle of the stage, which would be the habitat “rapidly repairing itself.” We still needed a way to have this tree rise up though. We began to research different ways we could do this, and finally settled on building a scissor lift. Our plan was that someone would be inside the rock, and when the time came, they could operate this mini scissor lift, and control the tree to rise up.
As for the species morph, we wanted our mamba to change colours. Black mambas are generally a grey to dark brown colour, and our plan was to have the mamba “morph” into a brighter colour during its first encounter. Our snake costume was similar to Chinese New Year dragon costumes. Julia had made a snake head out of some sheets and had a multi coloured sheet attached to it. Our plan was to have a darker sheet over top of that, which would be attached to the sheet with Velcro, and when our morph happened, someone would tear the sheet off, revealing the coloured sheet instead.
Ultimately, I feel like our presentation had a lot to be desired, as the habitat and the species morphs were both supposed to be connected in some way, and we would gain more points if the habitat morph was not initiated by a person. A bright spot in our presentation though was our setting. We put a lot of work into our props and it really helped our presentation a lot. Another bright spot was our groups effort and our dedication to DI. Many hours of our own time was spent at school trying to put together a presentation we could be proud of.
There still was a lot to improve on however, and I will be addressing that even more in the provincials post, but I feel like there were times where our group wasn’t all on the same page, and there were times where some of the group had no idea what was going on. I think that was the biggest issue for us, but luckily for us we had another chance in provincials!
