Oh, boy… I have been procrastinating doing this blog post for far too long, so let’s get this done.

Destination Imagination…. I’m still not too sure how I feel about it, but let me tell you this… it is most definitely negatively. For those of you who don’t know, Destination Imagination is a challenge in which you are put into teams and have to create something. It is for school age children and is quite possibly now the bane of my existence… well, that might be a slight exaggeration but you get the idea. I did not like it.

What I really didn’t like about it was the stress of the deadlines and having to stay after school and come in early to get things built and to film things. I feel like it should have at least been optional.

But enough complaining. Time for me to talk about what we did and use that as an excuse to complain some more!

It started with everyone being put into teams. There were two of each team, distinguished by colour. In one room was the yellow teams and in the other was the blue teams. There was a fine arts team, a scientific team, a technical team, and an engineering team. I was put onto the yellow engineering team along with Claire, Clare, Erik, Alicia, Kwosen, and David. We named the team “All Clear Engineers”.

For our main challenge, we had to build a building that combined an architectural style and an art style to show how opposites are complementary. For our architectural style, we chose Postmodernism. For our art style, we chose Aboriginal Art. We also had to make a movie about our building. I narrated the movie and filmed some parts of it. I also acted as Townsperson #2.

Now, building a building out of cardboard and painting it is actually a lot more difficult than you would think, because in our blueprints, we didn’t really specify the sizes of the pieces of the building. This led to a lot of confusion. We also had to stay after school quite a bit to build, paint and film, because it takes an excruciating amount of time to build a cardboard model of a building. We came in early, too. This meant that instead of coming into school from 9:30 am to 3:00 pm, we would be coming from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm. I also have a bad habit of procrastinating homework until the night before it is due, which leads to it piling up… a lot. So I would have sometimes up to two to two and a half hours of homework after a school day from 8:30 to 5:00, plus, I live about a half hour walk away from my school. Now we were coming in early and staying late a lot. I’m not blaming that on anyone, some of that is the result of my own bad decisions, but you can see why I developed a burning hatred for Destination Imagination.

Another thing we did were instant challenges. These are where we are given a task and are given very little time to plan for it and to do it. Usually around three to five minutes. I’m not allowed to disclose anything specific about what we did in instant challenges though.

Our building also needed to incorporate two team choice elements. A team choice element is something that shows off our interests, talents, etc. We chose basketball and cooking. We had to incorporate these into our video too. We also chose to make our building a rec centre.

I’ve told you all about the making of everything, so I think its time to show you the video. We also have a Q&A video. I hope you enjoy my narration!

Solution:

Q&A:

In conclusion, I would rather not do DI again. Not to say there weren’t some fun parts. Painting the building I enjoyed, but Destination Imagination was quite stressful. In all honesty, I feel like I would have enjoyed it more if we didn’t have to upload our final solution in the form of a video, rather than preform in person which I probably would have liked more. I did learn a lot about architectural styles though. I also learned a lot about team building and making compromises. Quite a lot of the time, one of our team members had an idea for something but they couldn’t follow through with it because the rest of the team didn’t agree with it. This was a tough skill to learn. We all had to work on working with a team too.

That’s pretty much it. I hope you enjoyed all 787 words of this blog post and I’ll see you next time!

Bye,

Dylan.