Hey guys, it’s March which means we’re right in the middle of Destination Imagination season! Yay… as you may remember from last year I have a love/hate relationship with DI. It’s fun to a point, then the stress gets to be too much and I hate it until the regional tournament where we just get to let go and hope everything works. But what gets me to that point of complete and utter stress and how can we improve for next time? That’s what I’ll be talking about today.
Based on the two years that I’ve done it now I’ve figured out some key patterns that end up bringing our teams down within the process of creating our solution. The first is what I think ended up being the fatal mistake for my team this year, that mistake is not reading through the challenge together and making sure everyone was on the same page. This could also be said as a lack of use of the Research and Understand competency but either way they both lead to our detriment. The reason this was a problem was that we all read the specific sections we were DRI’s of so we knew the requirements and rules but we didn’t look at the other sections. That meant that there was no way we could clarify between our teammates about the requirements which lead to some misunderstandings that would have made the challenges a lot more clear and easier to complete. To make sure this doesn’t happen again I’m going to take it upon my self to read the whole challenge booklet and highlight it like we did last year since that helped us a lot more than I had thought.
The other main problem I found that affected my team this year was the isolation between the different parts of the challenge. As I said before, there were DRI’s for each part of the challenge but really those DRI’s turned into the only people working on that part of the challenge except for the occasional talking so we could make sure that everyone was still on the same page. This ended up hurting our challenge by stopping us from collaborating together to create a better solution and also made each part of the challenge feel a little disjointed. I’m hoping we can fix this by working together on the different parts so it’s not just one person doing it and also maybe fix the disjointedness by rewriting the script a bit to make everything a lot smoother. Kaia and I have already started to collaborate together to remake parts of the impact scenery to hopefully get a better score on it.
At the end of the day, I think that we need to improve every part of our challenge so it’ll be up to snuff when we get to provincials. We need to figure out a way to have a working invention and a fridge that door doesn’t fall off, we need to actually electrically engineer an electrical circuit instead of just buying string lights, we need to make sure that all elements of the challenge are mentioned in the skit so we don’t loose points for not integrating them. But the problem is that we can’t do any of these things well without fixing the things I talked about in the paragraphs before hand.