What is Destination Imagination? DI is a tournament that allows students to express their creativity in groups from their classes. You may be confused and are wondering how students can be marked on something that is immeasurable like creativity. When I first heard about Destination Imagination, I was wondering the same thing. After talking to my teachers and classmates and researching DI more closely, I understood how the tournament worked a bit better.
My class was split into several groups that had to complete different challenges. For example, there was the scientific group, fine arts group, improv group, and more. I was put into a group with Willa, Kyle, and Ethan, and our topic was improv! Improvisation is a difficult skill that my group needed to work on right away. Not only did we have to practice improv, but we also needed to research twelve explorers and twelve cultural treasures that would be used in the skit. Although this seems overwhelming, we are only given two explorers and one cultural treasure that we have to use in our presentation during the actual tournament.
My group had to decide what we would prioritize when preparing for our improv skit, and we chose to focus on our improv skills instead of research. Of course, we still researched all of the explorers and decided on the cultural treasures ahead of time, but our main focus was to be able to act together. In the class time that we were given, we often went to a quiet room to run through games that would help us work together as a team.
As the Destination Imagination Tournament day neared, my team made a sign to represent us (a blue shrek cut out that says “SWEK” on its stomach). The reason that my team is named SWEK, is because of the first letters of our names: Sydney, Willa, Ethan, Kyle. My group also needed one more thing before we presented; a prop. The only prop that the improv groups can use is a plain, white sheet that has no significant value. This prop had to be used during our skit, but we could decide how and when we would use it. We also had to complete the forms from our project management package that would say what twelve explorers and cultural treasures we chose for the regional tournament. Being in an improv group meant that we didn’t have to complete as many project management forms as the rest of the groups.
Finally, March 3rd arrived! DI Tournament day! My team grabbed our sign and marched into the gym for the introduction to the tournament. Along with the other teams, we listened to the pledge and we got to see which schools we would be up against.
My team wasn’t presenting until 11:00, so we had enough time to watch a few of the other groups present their projects. I really loved watching the Fine Arts musical by Sofia, Lucas, Robbie, and Hannah! Watching some of these performances made me feel prepared for my performance, especially since the audiences were so supportive.
11:00 rolled around, and my team was a little nervous. Not only would we have to improvise, but also do it in front of our entire class and our teachers! Although this freaked us out at first, we realized that the people in the audience would only support us, so that gave us more confidence.
We were given our two explorers: Elon Musk and Ruth Benedict, and our cultural treasure was the Nautilus Submarine. The unfortunate part was that our skit had to take place in a perfume section of a department store. No matter what, this was going to be a very weird skit.
We started off our skit and we managed to get the audience and appraisers to laugh a few times, which was our goal. As our story developed, we remembered that we needed to open up the piece of paper that would tell us what our setback is. We opened the paper to find a very odd scenario, a mudslide.
All in all, my skit went very well and we were awarded first place out of the improv groups in our age group. I am very proud of the work that we produced as a team, and now that we are going to provincials, we can work even harder to produce higher quality work.
These are our raw scores!
In the beginning of this tournament, we decided that we would focus on the acting prospect of our skit, instead of the research. This was an interesting tactic that we are not going to pursue for the next competition. Now that we have the background knowledge of how to act, we can focus on researching the characters and cultural treasures more carefully. I have already made a flash card deck that will help me better understand each explorer.
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