Hello,

Over the past month and a half the grade 8’s and 9’s of PLP have been working on a big project, called Destination Imagination. It’s a big organization that runs an educational competition every year. In our PLP 9 class, we were split into groups to complete different challenges and work as individual teams, but still represent Seycove all together.
I was in a group with Spencer, Adam, Lucas, and Michael. We did the engineering challenge. The other challenges were technical, fine arts, community outreach, improv, and science. In our challenge, we needed to create two or more freestanding structures made from only balsa wood and glue. They also need to be able to hold weight on top, and it has to be incorporated into a story as well.
We started by planning out what our story would be and the designs of our wood structures.

We also started planning the story by choosing the two nations that have to come together to solve an international issue. The international issue in our story was global warming, drew we showed that with a ruined city as our background.

We chose 4 that would start out, but then two nations would back out, and Canada and the USA would be left. They would work together to build a space shuttle to send the rest of humanity to a distant planet called Gargantuan, which is similar to earth.

To start off the actual construction of our wood structures, we chose our designs. One was a rocket shape, and the other was the launch pad stand that held the rocket before takeoff.

These were the almost-completed versions of our balsa wood structures.
We also needed to build all our props and backgrounds. We started with drawing our backgrounds for each scene on paper, one was a wrecked city, one was a diagram of the Milky Way galaxy and the one Gargantuan is in, one is a construction site, and the last one blank because we wanted to project an animation onto it. We then built a stand for our backgrounds, with chairs, hockey sticks and a piece of bamboo. The backgrounds were taped onto the bamboo in a flip chart style. It did not look very good. Also during this time we were working on our script, the story of our play, the balsa wood structures and other props like boxes and costumes.

We pulled everything together just in time for a dress rehearsal six days before the actual event, and nothing looked that nice. We didn’t have the entire script at its best, the background stand looked like we found the stuff on the street, and we barely had any costumes. But after the dress rehearsal we worked really hard and managed to pull it off at the actual event really well.
To make it better, we tore down the old background stand and pasted all the backgrounds to cardboard (there is a photo above), which kept the paper from getting wrinkled, and we replaced the stand with 3 music stands which looked a lot cleaner.

I also started doing our animation. It was one of our team choice elements, which means it is something that shines and shows something that we are interested in. The animation was something I drew, and it was a slideshow format.

These were 3 slides from the animation. I drew the inside of the cockpit, and then replaced the view through the window for each slide. It was around twenty-six slides and showed the space shuttle launch from earth and land on Gargantuan four years later. It was fun to draw but took a long time.

On Friday, the day before the tournament, we all got together and practiced our performance a bunch of times until we were ready for the next big day.
After the day was over, we placed 5th out of 5, but still get to move on to provincials. We had a great story and props, but the balsa wood structures didn’t hold any weight because we had take 20 grams off them when we got there unexpectedly so they got really weak and broke before we could put weight on them.

We lost a lot of points
The day of the tournament was fun, we got to see our friends do their performances, played sports outside while waiting, and explored the big school where it was hosted.
Overall the creative process was awesome, especially to see the parts and pieces of our big project come together, and the actual tournament day was fun but really long.