Welcome back to another blog post, today I will be talking about the past Destination Imagination Regionals (DI), that happened earlier this month. We have been preparing for DI in class for about a month and a half before the tournament, and well let’s just say this tournament was a great learning experience. A really really good learning experience.

Let’s back it up a bit. Last year was my first time doing DI. Last year my group came first in every aspect of the tournament for both the Regional and Provincial competitions with minimal effort. This year we knew that we would be doing DI again, and I personally was not super excited, because it pushes you to do work outside of school and go outside your comfort zone to present. You might be like, why doesn’t he like that? Well personally I don’t really know. I don’t think its that I don’t like going outside of my comfort zone necessarily, but more that the stigma around DI  seeps in to my mindset, souring these aspects of the tournament.

Now that we know a little more about my mindset going into the tournament, let’s get a little more into how the process of getting into our groups and learning how to effectively collaborate together went. In my group none of us got the group members we had asked for, but this wasn’t that big of a problem, as we were mature and decided to rise above that fact instead of dwelling on it. My group is all boys, 4 in grade 10, and two in grade 9. Us grade 10’s knew that we had to rise up as the leaders and so that’s what we did, quickly developing a plan to keep us on track and aware of what was going on. Spoiler alert, this didn’t work at all. We assigned ourselves different parts of the challenge, I had to deal with a part of the machine.

Fast forward to the tournament date, we were unprepared and stressed. it was only about a week before the tournament that we had realized that there was a lot of work to be done and a lot of tasks that we thought were completed that weren’t. This left us scrambling at the last minute to get stuff done that we thought was already done. At one point we are so close to disqualification because we had not handed in forms and other things, that my teachers had to directly reach out to specific members of the group through text messages. The day of the performance we actually got a lot of work done and came up with a machine that we believe worked. At the actual performance, no one knew their lines and only one of the two machines worked. This was a big disappointment for us in the group especially the grade 10’s, as we believe that this was done and prepared. We had a very honest conversation after the tournament about what happened and why it happened and how we can improve. Our teachers are helping us along the way to this time.

Overall, it was a great learning experience because I never really been part of a DI group that fell apart that fast not much. I learned how to rise as a leader in short time situations and how stressful it could be. Learning how to lose is never easy, but I do believe that losing is the best way to learn. Regardless of our outcome I’m so proud of this group and can’t wait for the provincials!