The big project we were working on in our term two maker class was Destination Imagination. How the D.I. website describes the program is; Destination Imagination is a hands-on, project-based educational experience that encourages creativity, collaboration, communication and critical thinking skills. Each year seven new STEAM Challenges are created by our teams of content experts and educators to help students from K to Grade 12 learn how to think, not what to think. Destination Imagination applies the creative process to help student teams create their own unique solutions to the requirements posed by the Challenges.”

In early January our teachers sent us a google form, asking us what were our top three choices for challenges were, and who we do and don’t want to be with. I was put into a group with Angelo, Kaden, Ciara, Kira and Rhiann. The challenge we were assigned was the scientific challenge; A Medical Mystery.

For the challange we had to research about a disease, illness, injury, bodily change, or other physical and/or mental health condition of our choice, then present what we had learnt about the medical condition through a short performance eight minutes in length. The only guidelines for the performance were: at least one character must be affected by the medical condition of our choice, the human character must experience at least one symptom caused by the Medical Mystery, we also had to a diagnosis, for this challenge a diagnosis is the team’s explanation of the Medical Mystery. In our performance we also had to include a Sympt-O-Matic, a Sympt-O-Matic is device that represents the area of the body affected by the Medical Mystery, the Sympt-O-Matic must be operated by technical methods with the least human interaction possible. We also had to create two team choice elements that would contribute to the story. For the regionals our first team choice element was a sound track that Rhiann created in GarageBand. The second team choice element was created by Angelo, it was a coded heart monitor.

The Destination Imagination regional tournament was held at our school, Seycove Secondary. There were about one thousand people and sixty six teams. In our age group (middle level grades six to eight) there were five other teams. At the end of the day there was a ceremony in the gym where they announced the winning teams and handed out ribbons to the top three teams in each category. My team placed second overall, which is pretty good since it was our first time competing in DI.

Overall I really enjoyed the DI regionals experience and would do it again.

-Finn