Destination Imagination Regionals 2018

We did it again! This is our third year doing Destination Imagination. D.I. Is a tournament with competitors from all over North America. Each team gets to pick from one of 6 challenges and must present their solution to appraisers and an audience at a tournament. If you would like to learn more about it you can go on the Destination Imagination Website, or you could read one of my past blog posts Destination Imagination Regionals 2017 and Destination Imagination Provincials 2017. We started off by learning what the challenges were and picking our top three choices. We were then put into groups by our teacher and assigned a challenge.

I was assigned the engineering challenge which was my first choice so I was very happy. I was put in a group with Mimi, Ruby, Ryan, Michael, and Adam. The engineering challenge was called Drop Zone. Here is the challenge video.

I wanted to do this challenge because I had never done the engineering challenge before and it looked really fun. Before we could start coming up with a solution to our challenge, we had to do some preparation. We had to do lots of project management. We had to read the rules, give out team roles, figure out what materials we could use, and much more. The project management is very important because it makes sure that we follow the rules and get as many points as possible. One of the first things we had to do was come up with a team name. We were struggling to come up with an idea but we found a restaurant with a name we liked so we went with that. Our team name is Tender Greens.

Once we get were done with all of the project management we got to start brainstorming. We started off with coming up with a plan for our story. We had come up with a few ideas but they were constantly changing. We decided that we wanted to do a serious story to be different because most people do very light hearted stories. We also wanted to focus on a real life thing that many people deal with so we decided to do a story about anxiety. Once our story was decided, we started working on our structure and event depicter.

For our structure we wanted to try and do something simple that we knew could hold a ton of weight. We started off with a good idea but when we tested it it broke. We ended up going through a few designs before we found one that worked. After our structure was complete we worked on the event depicter. The event depicter was something you had to make that uses technical methods to visually or audibly depict the sudden event within the story. Our sudden event was an anxiety attack so we decided to make a podium that uses speakers to play dramatic music while the anxiety attack is happening. We built the podium and put the speakers into it. We had to wire the speakers up to an old radio and we made the music too. The last thing we had to do was come up with our team choice elements.

In every challenge each team has to have two creations in their presentation that show off the teams skills, interests, and talents. We struggled with coming up with any ideas because we couldn’t figure out how to use our talents. For our first team choice element we decided to do special effects makeup. I am pretty good at makeup so I was in charge of this. I gave Ryan a beard because is character is supposed to be older, I gave ruby eye makeup because she is anxiety, and I gave Adam many tattoos because they suit his character. For our second team choice element Ryan is very good with technology so he created a scene in our story using green screen and projected it on our screen. Once everything was done we got all of our needed props and costumes and we practiced our presentation many times.

This year the regionals tournament was at Seycove which was amazing. It did take a little more work because we had to set everything up and clean up afterwards but it was totally worth it. We didn’t have to worry about moving our stuff to a different school and we didn’t have to drive an hour to the tournament. We got the schedule the day before and we were excited to show all of our hard work. Here was the schedule for the day.

We had our instant challenge at 10:20. The instant challenge is a mini performance or task challenge that you have to do. We did many practice challenged before the tournament and everyone on our team has a role for instant challenges. Sadly I cannot tell you about the instant challenge we did until after the global tournament at the end of May. I will update this post after that. After our instant challenge we went around the school and watched our friends presentations. It was so much fun to watch,the other teams present and be there to support them. There was a lot of waiting between some presentations so we practiced our presentation a couple of times throughout the day. When the time came for us to present I was a little nervous. We did our performance and everything went pretty smoothly. We ran out of time at the end so we missed about two of our lines. I was really proud of how the performance went. Here is our performance

Our presentation time was very late in the day so after we were done we waited for a little bit then it was time for the award ceremony. In our age decision in our challenge there were 6 other teams so we had a lot of competition. Some of the other challenges only had 2 teams competing. Our team got third place which we were pretty happy about. We got raw scores for our performance which our just the average scores the appraisers gave us. These aren’t our final scores because they change based on how the other teams did. Here are our raw scores.

This has by far been my favourite D.I. Tournament. It was so much easier having the tournament at our school. I worked really well with my group and I’m really happy with how our presentation went, but we aren’t done yet. We now have to prepare for Provincials. The Provincials are on April 7th so we don’t have a lot of time to make changes but we will work hard to make everything better. We are going to have to edit our story, change our team choice elements a little, and figure out a way we can get more weight on our structure faster. I am very excited to get to compete again and hopefully we will be able to improve our scores.