It was a calm week after winter break. The birds were chirping, the sun was shining, and all the students of PLP were working happily. Then, out of the blue, came our biggest project yet, Destination Imagination. Destination Imagination (or D.I. for short) is a worldwide competition where schools and other organizations create performances based on specific themes, then present them to an audience. Teams are divided into different challenges (scientific, technical, etc.), and have to present a main performance, as well as solve an instant challenge that they learn about at the tournament. Although it was a lot of work to get our performance ready in time for the regional tournament, we had a lot of fun making, and presenting it.

My Destination Imagination Certificate

Making our Performance

We started our D.I. unit at the end of January, but before we could start working on our performances, we had to choose our challenge. The challenges available included a technical challenge, a scientific challenge, and improv challenge, and engineering challenge, and a fine arts challenge. I decided to do the scientific challenge because it was about spies going on a secret mission, and it included the encryption and decryption of secret messages.

Now that we had our challenges, it was time to plan out what we needed to do in order have our performance ready in time. We made a schedule that estimated when things should be done by, as well as what materials we might need. Next it was time to come up with our story and script. None of us were able to think up of an idea we could all agree on though, until one of our team members suggested that we make our performance about a food mystery as a joke. We actually thought this was a good idea and went with it. After many days of building, writing, and painting, our performance’s props and scenery was complete and we were ready to go. Then we realized, we hadn’t practiced our script the full way through once.

Me Building an Alter for D.I

Challenges to Overcome

One of the biggest challenges our group had to overcome was being under rehearsed. Up until about a week before D.I, my team had mainly focused on building our costumes, props, and scenery because those were things that we needed to make at school when we had all of our materials. We decided that rehearsing could be done after school through video chats, and wasn’t a big priority because if we had to, we could just wing it. The problem was though that when we wanted to video chat, some people in the group were always busy so we could never practice all together. Luckily for us, we were able to all get together the day before the regional tournament and have a full dress rehearsal, which helped us greatly.

Another problem we faced was lack of communication. Even though we created a group chat, google document, and talked to each other each day in class, we still weren’t informing everyone about what was going on. This proved to be a problem on multiple occasions, including when I wrote down one of our team choice elements to be a fight scene, but apparently the fight scene had been removed from the performance all together. I think the main reason for lack of communication was because everyone had their own ideas on what they wanted our performance to be like. People would get upset when we couldn’t agree, so they would go off and make their own things, even if the group hadn’t agreed on that being in the project.

Putting the Finishing Touches on our Costumes

What I’ve learned

So far, D.I has been exciting, chaotic, and a really great learning experience for me. I’ve learned how to code, build cool gadgets, but most importantly, I’ve learned about teamwork. Before I came into PLP, I had mainly only worked on individual projects, and even in the past 6 months, most of the projects I’ve done have still centred around me and my work. Because of this, it was a bit hard for me to make the transition from solo work to group work, but I managed and ended up learning some valuable skills.