Destination Imagination Provincials 2018

It feels so amazing to be done Destination Imagination and be able to look back on everything I did this year. If don’t dont know what it is, D.I. is a tournament that teams from all over North America compete in. There are 7 challenges each team can choose from and they have to solve their challenge. They also have to present their challenge to a group of appraisers on tournament days and compete with other teams to try and make it to the next tournament. You first compete at regionals, then Provincials, and if you’re lucky enough you can compete at globals.

This year I was on a team with Mimi, Ruby, Adam, Ryan, and Michael. Our challenge was the engineering challenge.

We competed in regionals earlier this year so if you would like to read about how that went click here. We knew after regionals that we had a lot of work to do. We came third and our scores were pretty high but we knew we could make them better. We started off by recognizing what we could change and imagining how we could make it better. Our two biggest concerns were getting more points for our team choice elements and getting more weight on our structure in a shorter period of time. We started off on working on our lowest scores which were our team choice elements.

For our first TCE we decided to add more makeup to the characters to get more points. We still did that tattoos, beard and scary makeup on ruby. We added more tattoos, wrinkles on Mimi’s character, and freckles on Michael’s character. For our second TCE the score was already pretty high but there was still something we could do. We put a pole in the bottom of the projector screen so it wasn’t wavy and it didn’t distort the faces in the phone call video. To make more time for dropping weights we cut a scene from our story. We practiced it many times to make sure Ruby could drop all the weights before we ran out of time. After all of that was done we were ready for Provincials.

When we arrived at Provincials everything started to go wrong. We dropped the podium and it broke. Luckily we were able get some tape and fix it but we were all a little on edge by that point. One of the wires in our speakers snapped but we had some people on our team who are very smart and were able to fix it. Once everything was fixed we headed up to our instant challenge. I can’t tell you what is was but it went pretty well. I’ll come back and add what the challenge was after the end of the globals challenge. After the instant challenge we spent more time practicing and everything was working perfectly, or so we thought.

When it was time for our main challenge we were very ready. We got started and everything was going smoothly until we had to play the phone call scene. The audio was not working for some reason. We had to skip that scene and continue on. When we got to the weight dropping scene, even though our structure was identical to before it broke on after the first weight. Even though everyone was very shocked and disappointed we finished our performance strong. After the performance we were all a little sad. It was so disappointing to have so much go wrong. We soon realized there was nothing we could have done and we were happy with all of the work we put into it.

Evaluating our performance after we were done was difficult. We got our scores and we were not very happy but they did make sense for our performance. Our scores went down in everything except for our first team choice element where it actually went up a couple of points. We ended up coming in 7th out of seven teams. Here are our scores and comments

Although things didn’t go as planned it was still an amazing experience. Many people often ask me why I do DI and even though I’m technically forced to do it it has a lot of really awesome benefits. I have learned so much about myself, my team members, and how to be a better learner. I feel that DI has made me a smarter, more creative person and has helped prepare me for a better future. There was a scientific study done that measured student engagement and creative attitudes and values among students who participate in Destination Imagination and students who do not. The results were amazing.

Students who participate in Destination Imagination were more engaged and imaginative when completing given tasks, more creative than non-DI participants, more self-confident and tenacious, able to elaborate on and generate more ideas than non-DI participants, great collaborators—86% of DI students agree that their teamwork skills improved within 1-2 years of participation, and they were more inquisitive—92% of DI students agree that solutions to problems are often improved by considering a variety of perspectives. If you would like to read the article about this study click Here.

Destination Imagination was such an amazing experience. I have done it for three years in a row and each experience was better than the last. I’ve have been able to look back and see how much I have grown as a learner and as a person. I have improved so many of my skills and I am ready to use them. I will never forget what DI has taught me. And I got an amazing certificate to remind me forever. 😊