Tag: challenge

Am I Imagining This Destination?

Have you heard of Destination Imagination?

Destination Imagination (or just DI) is an international competition that our school competes in. I am now going to direct you to the DI website because I think that they do a great job explaining what DI is all about. The Destination Imagination website is here. (I really suggest that you go to the website before reading further.)

The time had come for another gruelling term of Destination Imagination . This year, I was a part of one of two Seycove Gr 9 Improv teams. We got to present in person this year instead of a video like last year. It was a lot more fun but definitely more stressful. Our team “Leap Before you Look” was an improv team. So what was this year’s challenge? Well this year’s challenge was called “Festival Frenzy” and in this challenge, we would try to achieve a random goal at a festival from around the world. We had to research festivals, learn how to successfully carry out improv performances, practice running through the challenge, and enhance our skit with imaginary items, represented by a set of cardboard boxes.

The following is a list of all the festivals. Since we are in the secondary level, we had to research 10 festivals. Our chosen 10 are highlighted.

All of our research went into what we call the “festival binder”. The festival binder started off as a shared pages document that all of our research was recorded in and we later printed it out, so that we could bring a hard copy of it to the final competition. Here is an example of what one of the pages in the festival binder looks like;

When we are about to preform at the tournament, we draw one of those ten festivals randomly, along with a random goal (i.e. go skydiving) and a random “fork in the road” that will come into play later (I.e. make soap or find a way to keep your tools from rusting). The goal does not have to actually be accomplished in the skit but it should be heavily incorporated. The fork in the road comes into play during a 30 second intermission between Act One and Act Two. You then declare which fork in the road activity you will be using and then resume the skit to finish up act 2. 

Since we didn’t actually have to create a script or props for our challenge, we had a lot of free time to prepare. We were fairly disorganized at the start and didn’t really start to put tons of work in until later on. Our festival binder was lacking a lot of detail in the beginning but we did end up fixing it towards the end. The unstructured time to practice was quite challenging for certain members of our group and so subsequently we spent way to much time slacking off. Needless to say, this was definitely going to kick us in the ass later if we continued on that way. After a few failed practice performances, we started to get our act together. On the more positive side, I think we definitely showed a lot of growth by the end. Our final performance was pretty good (definitely the best one we had ever done). And even though I screwed up by not finding a watch to bring so we ran out of time for the end of the skit, I think that it still ended in a successful way and I am super proud. Our team was able to bounce ideas off of each other and we worked very well as a group (with maybe a bit too much banter apparently :p).

 

I know that there are a few things I can work on/hopefully change for participation in DI next year. Our group argued too much and that may just be because we had some clashing personalities but I think it overall did put ourselves at a disadvantage. The banter was never super serious as we all kind of consider each other friends, but I think it was just a bit of a time waster. Speaking of time wasting, we were all easily distracted by unimportant things such as having a irrelevant conversation with someone else. I think that in the end I am super proud of my group and spending time with them was actually quite fun.

And the moment we have all been waiting for, the video of us performing our challenge;

Overall, DI taught me leadership, teamwork, persistence, creativity, and so much more. I am really excited to see how I face future DI challenges in the years ahead. I want to say a huge thank you to my team members, Ben Y, Jocelyn, Noah, and Carter, without whom none of this would’ve been possible. I had a lot of fun with you guys and hopefully we are not in the same group next year 😁.

See you next year Destination imagination 👋🏼!

As always, Brooke

Destination Imagination; In theory.

Have you heard of Destination Imagination?

Destination Imagination (or just DI) is an international competition that our school competes in. I am now going to direct you to the DI website because I think that they do a great job explaining what DI is all about. The Destination Imagination website is here. (I really suggest that you go to the website before reading further.)

I got the opportunity to be on one of the scientific challenge teams. The scientific challenge this year was called “In Theory”. You had to break or bend a scientific law using technical methods and create a documentary film about it. My group spent AGES trying to decide on a scientific law to bend. It was a tad bit stressful seeing as the scientific law is the most important part of out solution to the challenge. We ended up figuring out that we could bend the law of buoyancy by creating an electromagnet out of an iron bolt and some batteries. (Huge shoutout to my teammate Nolan for heading up the scientific part of this challenge!) Here is a video of the anti-buoyancy machine;

We also had to come up with a story that our documentary would follow. The story had to include a witness who sees and reacts to the law being bent/broken and an expert who has great knowledge of the scientific law itself. Again we had many ideas and a very hard time deciding on a plot for our story, it was a painful process.

Usually DI tournaments would start in-person at a regional level but with COVID-19 being a thing, the process changed to just handing in a video to be judged at the national level.

After many, many, MANY weeks of working on our challenge solution, it came to an end. Here is the final video;

We also made a Q&A video to go along with our challenge solution that explains some things that you may not have picked up in the final video;

One of my teammates also made this blooper video that I LOVE because it reminds me of how much fun we had during DI.

Overall, DI taught me leadership, teamwork, persistence, creativity, and so much more! I am really excited to see how I face future DI challenges in the years ahead of me. I want to say a huge thank you to my team members, Nolan, Jocelyn, Santiago, and Carter, without whom none of this would’ve been possible.

See you next year Destination imagination 👋🏼!

As always, Brooke.

Do I have a growth mindset?

Ah

Welcome back my friends.

I would like to present a book to you. This book is about something called a growth mindset.

I have been keeping a reflection journal as we learned about growth mindsets in class. I hope that you take a quick look through my book because I have been working pretty hard on it. Here it is;

 

The next part of this project is creating a statement/goal for my growth mindset. This statement will go along with a selfie of my face. MY FACE 😬. I think that the thought of a selfie of my face being in the class is a whole other challenge that I need to tackle  with a growth mindset. But what’s done is done and I know that I will move on from the embarrassment.

My statement for the selfie is “When I receive criticism, I will review my work with an open mindset and apply specific revisions so that I can feel more confident taking on academic risks when I know that I can deal with having a First Attempt In Learning.”. Now if you read my journal, you would know that I talk a lot about my fixed mindset on academic failure.

Page from my book

That photo is a page from my book where I went in-depth about my mindset on academics, achievement and failure. On the next page I talk about three things that I will try to do to change my fixed mindset into a growth mindset, and my selfie statement is basically trying to do the same thing.

My selfie w/ statement

I believe that this growth mindset challenge will be something that I have to work on for the rest of eternity and I challenge YOU to do the same. Thank you for taking the time to read my post and it would be awesome if you could leave a comment about something that you have a fixed mindset about that you want to change.

As always, Brooke.

Student Blogging Challenge; a reflection.

Hi everyone 👋🏼

Unfortunately this will be the last Student Blogging Challenge post for this year.

If you didn’t already notice, I have been taking part in the 2021 Student Blogging Challenge. We accomplished 10 SBC prompts for our blogs. You can find 10 similar prompts here.

I can definitely say that over the course of this challenge I have seen my blog and my blogging skills greatly improve. We started off the challenge with simply updating the about me page and making some commenting guidelines to improve the quality of our site. We also looked at the themes of our blogs and learned about blog layout. At the beginning, I was sceptical that I would really enjoy blogging. But now that I’ve had so much fun making cool posts, its not so bad.

I would have to say that my favourite SBC post would have to be either Worm the hero or A dive into literature; poetry. I was thinking of maybe doing a dive into literature series where I talk about different types of literature. Maybe I’ll crank another post out this spring break and keep it an on going thing? Possible topics could include classic novels, song lyrics, quotes, folklore, fairytales, legends, and if there is any other topics I didn’t already list, comment them down below!

The blogging challenge has given me the opportunity to learn how to express my ideas through a type of medium that I probably wouldn’t have used otherwise. I think that I have started to learn how to show my voice in my writing. Thank you for taking the time to read my post.

As always, Brooke.

p.s. – Here are all of the posts that I made in the student blogging Challenge.

Day 1- About me page

Day 2- Commenting guidelines

Day 3- Embedded content

Day 4- Fun with photos

Day 5- Appearance and Widget – this prompt wasn’t an actual post. I changed the appearance of my blog and added a calendar widget.

Day 6- Music

Day 7- Emoji story

Day 8- Blogging like a boss – Again this prompt wasn’t a post but more of a check-in on our summative blogging skills. We had to go through our most recent summative post and look at the aspects of a summative post that we should have included.

Day 9- holidays and festivities

Day 10- Free choice