Stacking Blocks and Life Lessons: What I Learned Destination Imagination

Hello and welcome to my blog. This post is about my latest experience with Destination Imagination (DI). 

This year, I had the absolute chaos-filled joy of competing in Destination Imagination (again) with my team, The Block Busters (yes, we had the best name). (I also barely managed to escape with my life and quite a few battle scars).

Our challenge was a technical one: build up a structure using technical methods, and then use completely different methods to tear it down. It was like the ultimate engineering-meets-destruction test. And if that doesn’t sound cool to you, then I don’t know what does.

We spent months planning, building, testing, re-building, and occasionally watching everything collapse way before it was supposed to. It was frustrating. It was messy. It was also kind of amazing.

Regional Tournament: The Plot Twist

For our regional tournament, we showed up so prepared. We had rehearsed like mad scientists. Our stack was solid, our teardown method worked (well, most of the time), and our skit tied everything together in a way we thought was super clever. We were pumped. Then we got our results. Let’s just say… we didn’t place where we thought we would. And yeah, it stung a little. Okay, it stung a lot. We had worked so hard! What did we miss? But instead of giving up or sulking too long, we took it as a sign: we could do better. So we leveled up.

Provincial Tournament: Déjà Vu with Duct Tape

For the provincial tournament, we brought our A-game—and then some. We made our structure stronger, made our teardown flashier, improved our skit, and worked even more tightly as a team. We pushed ourselves creatively and technically. We were in it to win it. And then… we got the same placement.

At first? Super frustrating. Like “scream-into-a-pillow” frustrating. It felt like all our effort didn’t show up in the scores. But then something clicked for me.

What I Actually Learned

Sure, I had wanted a trophy. But what I got instead was something better (okay, maybe not shinier, but definitely more valuable):

• Persistence matters. We kept going when it would’ve been easy to stop. We didn’t just accept our first result—we worked harder to improve.
• Teamwork is everything. The Block Busters became more than just a team name—we were a unit. We learned how to support each other under pressure, how to solve problems together, and how to laugh through the disasters (looking at you, duct tape mishap #47).
• You can’t control the outcome—but you can control the effort. The rankings didn’t reflect how much we grew, but we know how far we came. And that’s something no score can measure.
• Creativity doesn’t always fit inside a scoring rubric. We took risks. We tried big ideas. And even if those didn’t pay off on paper, they meant something to us.

In the end, I’m walking away from this experience with skills I never expected to build—from quick thinking and engineering to collaboration and self-confidence. And honestly? I’m proud of the work we did. We built something awesome. And yeah, we smashed it too (literally and metaphorically).

We were The Block Busters. And next year I’ll be part of a brand new team (hopefully battle scar free)

(And glitter. I’m still voting for glitter.)