Hi everyone,

Since November I have been preparing for a big contest. It’s an event called Destination Imagination or DI. This actually wasn’t my first time competing in the challenge. In grade 8 I competed as well (read post here). However this year my category was completely different and really pushed my comfort zone. My challenge was called Festival Frenzy. Also I would highly recommend checking out my group members posts. Annie, Ethan, Jakub, Logan

Video of our performance

So if you don’t know much about DI you can visit the organization’s official website here. But the quick rundown is, its a challenge where teams compete in various categories. These challenges are centred around teaching youth the skills needed to grow as a learner. Our class competed in 4 categories, Technical, Scientific, Improv, and Fine Arts. I was apart of the improv challenge which is something far outside my comfort zone. 

I am not typically comfortable with acting and presenting creative work. The strange thing is I am quite comftorable public speaking but not very comfortable acting. It seems kind of strange to me. I am fully okay with talking about a project I made however, the second I have to act I freak out. Anyways getting back on topic. This challenge gave me a great opportunity to grow and become better at acting. It also taught me other skills such as teamwork, leadership, and Flexibility. These are all skills which I am always trying to improve. Overall I found that I grew a lot during this challenge. 

One of the biggest points of contention throughout our team was practice. This included both how it should be execute and how often it should be done. Some group members thought we should only practice the actual challenge. Others thought we should try various improv games. This was tough to settle and often ended up in various group members not practicing for weeks on end. Practice was definitely the biggest part of our teams execution of this challenge I would change. Our group should have been more open to trying new things and should have tried more styles of practice. We also really should have practiced more often. 

All in all DI was a great learning experience. I improved a lot of important skills and learned a lot of lessons. I think my team should have done some things differently but there’s nothing I can do now except reflect.