Destination Imagination- Again!

INTRO

The first time we competed in the Destination Imagination tournaments, we did not do great. We have made so much progress this year since we began working on Destination Imagination, and I know we will continue to do so.

CHALLENGE

This year we were challenged to ‘Design and build a pinball system through which a pinball moves and interacts with 3 machine modules. During the Presentation, we needed to move the pinball through the pinball system for as long as possible.’ We also had to ‘Create and present an action/adventure story about a hero who goes on an extraordinary mission. We  also had to create and present two Team Choice Elements that show off the team’s interests, skills, areas of strength, and talents.’ We decided to go with an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ theme, but changed the plot to a version where Alice was the antagonist, and the Madd Hatter was the protagonist, trying to free Wonderland from Alice’s evil grasp.

BEFORE

We went into our first Destination Imagination tournament with pretty much just a pile of recycling. We had a ramp with a (not working) slingshot, a table with a (not working) spiral ramp to roll down into our sound element, a shell chime. Theoretically, the ball would roll out of the chimes onto our (not working) flippers which would (not) roll it back up the ramp to do it again. Obviously, this didn’t work. Our pinball machine was also very ugly, we attempted to spray paint it with some ‘Alice in Wonderland’ themed colours, but without a base coat, it was just more ugly than before.

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CHANGES

Over the course of the three days we were all around during spring break, me and my team completely re-designed our pinball machine. My group and I spent many hours in Ella’s garage building a new and improved pinball machine. We built a strong wooden table with many  parts. It has flippers, ramps, bumpers, and even a slingshot launcher. We spray painted it white and decorated it in the theme of Alice in Wonderland.

RPReplay_Final1712964978

FAIL

One thing that I think is important to mention is how the F.A.I.L. acronym affected my mindset during my whole D.I. experience. Fail stands for ‘first attempt in learning’. Our original version of our pinball machine was definitely a fail- or so I thought! When I began to think about Destination Imagination as a F.A.I.L., I was able to take the next step in making our pinball machine better than ever.

AWARDS

Using the F.A.I.L. mindset, we were able to nab the third place technical challenge trophy, and the first place instant challenge trophy. It felt great to win something, especially after we compared how we did this time to how we did in the last tournament. In the last tournament, we also got third in our technical challenge, but against a lot less people, and we got a high score in the technical challenge as well.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, our Destination Imagination journey has been rocky to say the least, but we have improved. I am thrilled about how much progress we have made, and I know my next journey in the DI program will be even better.

What Time Is It? MPol Time!

Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.

Welcome to my MPol blog post! I will be working on retelling my PLP journey so far. Enjoy!

 

Favourite Projects!🤩

Some of the projects that we worked on this year interested me more than others, like the poem Ebook, the Scratch science game, and the Genghis Khan skit. I can see that I work better on a project when I enjoy it! I feel that I created high quality work on these three projects because they were fun to spend time on and I was excited to work hard.

Poems, Genghis, and Video games📜🕹️🥷

⬜️For our poem e-book, we answered the question, ‘How Might I Write Poems I Enjoy And Show Who I Am’. I found that I enjoyed writing these poems so much more when I chose a topic related to something happening in my life or something that is important to me. I ended up writing 10 poems including 7 different types of poems, and three haikus, about all kinds of things including cows, pigeons, barbies, and miso soup. I loved using Sketches Pro to draw the photos for the ebook, and I enjoyed writing the short and sweet Haikus. I also appreciated the freedom of writing the free verse poems.   Since I enjoyed the process and had fun with it,  I created high quality work that I was proud of.                                                                                                                                                                                                                         ⬜️In science, we were asked to code a game on scratch that creatively demonstrated our knowledge of atoms. I created a game show and a host character named A-tom. He is my favourite part of this game with his silly (and sometimes offensive) replies to your answers to the trivia questions. I am very familiar with Scratch because I used it a lot when I was younger and I also used it to animate my PLP entrance video last year. I was able to use my scratch skills to help my class mates with building their games and I really enjoyed being a helper and a leader.                                                                                                                                                                                                             ⬜️For Humanities,  Tyler, Madeline and I wrote a musical skit about Chinggis Khan, and his role as a leader. It was so much fun to write and film our little skit, and I think our final project was both hilarious and educational. We worked well together as a group and felt great about our work.

https://www.blog44.ca/cecem/2023/11/30/the-story-of-how-i-got-my-face-stuck-in-a-paintinga-work-in-progress/

https://bpb-ca-c1.wpmucdn.com/blog44.ca/dist/f/986/files/2023/11/RPReplay_Final1700254581.mov

My Life In Poems

Welcome to the A-Tom Trivia Show!

Growth🌱

A few of my projects or assignments didn’t meet my standards and weren’t my best work. I can see from my early projects that I have grown a lot since the start of the year, especially in my ability to do group work and collaborate well with my peers. I felt this was a challenge during our winter exhibition and during our It’s (not) the End of the World Project. I could also work on going deeper into my learning with all my writing including blog posts and novel studies.

Group Work👨‍👩‍👧‍👧

During the Winter Exhibition, I struggled with the teamwork aspects, especially when it came to the distribution of work. I was still getting used to collaborating with a team, and relying on other people to do important work made me nervous. In the end it all worked out, and I think my teamwork skills and my leadership skills grew from working on this project.                                                                                                                                                          The ‘It’s The End of The World as we Know It’ song wasn’t my favourite project for many reasons. The group work was problematic, and the singing was painful, but it was a great way to get to know my classmates. This was because everyone wrote lyrics about their worldview and used specifics that represented themselves as both a student and a person. We all worked together as a group better once we got to know and understand each other better.

I found the first few PLP projects very big and difficult. Now that I’m getting better at the technology and have a few assignments under my belt, it’s getting easier. The projects are still challenging but they don’t feel as impossible anymore.

e-iceberg-and-what-time-is-it/

 

 

Going Deeper and Accepting Feedback 🕳️

It was- and still is – hard for me to do the deep thinking that takes my work from good to amazing. I know I can do it.  It is always easy for me to answer the question in a basic way but it can be harder for me to get into the right mindset to go the extra step for unique, deep thinking. My work improves so much every time I do go that extra step, and I try to make an effort to take it, but it is a challenge.

I love writing, and for my blog posts, or my poems, I wrote about things that have happened to me or around me. I need to push myself to go deeper and be more specific about how it makes me feel, or what I learned, or even how I could do better! I am not sure if I do this consistently with my blog posts, but with my poems, I do think that I took this extra step. I believe that you can see this in my poems because they all turned out so well.

For the rest of the year, I will strive to accept feedback more easily and always revise my work. If I do this, my work will be consistently better, and I will have began a new habit that will benefit me in the long run.

 

Learning Plan🖇️

As I look back at my Learning plan, I can see that I have accomplished many of the growths and skills I wrote about. I have definitely improved on my organization, helping my peers, and learning to use my technology. I will continue to grow in these areas throughout the year, getting better at them and doing them more. I am so happy to see how much I have progressed within these goals, and I know I will continue to do so forever.                                                                                                                                                                        I also mentioned that I needed help with things like organization, encouragement, respect, catching up on work, and I have gotten all of them. I also mentioned I was strong at taking feedback, taking responsibility, participation, ethics, empathy, time management, and teamwork. All of these strengths have been tested this whole year in things like the Exhibition, DI, and more, and my strengths have grown and flourished because of this.

F.A.I.L.🚨*

*irst ttempt n earning

This year, even though I have done a lot of things I am proud of, there are many things I could have done a lot better. On March 2nd, 2024, we had our very first Destination Imagination tournament, and not everything went according to plan. Our pinball machine absolutely failed, our script was way too short and mostly improv, and our pinball machine was basically four pieces of cardboard balancing on some wood. Now? It’s a completely different thing. Honestly it feels like we could write a ‘rags to riches’ story about our pinball machine. My group and I spent many hours in Ella’s garage building a new and improved pinball machine. We created a strong wooden table with many  parts. It has flippers, ramps, bumpers, and even a slingshot launcher. We spray painted it white and decorated it in the theme of Alice in Wonderland.  This machine started as an actual fail and became a perfect example of an F.A.I.L.  I am supremely proud of the amount our group improved from the first to second DI tournament.

The F.A.I.L. acronym changed my mindset from a fixed to a growth mindset and helped me look at our first  DI as a way to learn. I will do my best to continue to use this idea throughout the rest of this school year.

https://www.blog44.ca/cecem/2024/03/15/destination-imagination-what/

 

Overall, my PLP journey has been interesting and challenging. I have already grown so much, and I am excited to see where I will get by the end of the year.