Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, and even so you probably know what’s going on in our world involving the worldwide pandemic, COVID-19. As the world has gone into lockdown pretty much everything has been canceled, including Destination Imagination, but that doesn’t stop us PLP learners. Due to our keen teachers we worked around this great barrier and came up with a solution in which where we could present our challenge although being in separate places. At first I was very sceptical and thought that we were taking this too far but as the days went on I found myself surprisingly enjoying our makeshift tournament. 

We were being assed on the same competency as last time, Research and Understand. I kept on thinking about this because I had to figure out how this whole online situation would work and understand these different perspectives. We had to research some possible ideas for our improvements and how we were going to do this online. There were many problems that needed to be solved and I think I took them on well. 

In a normal situation provincials would have been a few days ago and we would’ve been working our fingers to bone perfecting our solution, but things have changed, and this isn’t a normal situation. Despite the fact that Destination Imagination was officially canceled we still had to look at it like it wasn’t and keep the ball rolling in order to present our improved solution to our teachers. After our regionals performance, my team and I came up with a list of some changes that we wanted to make that would help us gain more points and have a better overall solution. So we set to work, fixing our script, props, and pretty much changing the whole thing with keeping the base idea of being on the moon. As spring break came closer and closer my team was getting more prepared and ready for the big provincials tournament; then we heard the news. 

Our whole class had mixed feelings about this, some really wanted to show off their new solution while others were jumping for joy due to the cancellation. I  was floating in between these two emotions, one half of me was upset that all our time and work has gone to waste but the other side was glad that I don’t have to humiliate myself again in front of even more people than the first time. Everyone in our class thought the tournament was canceled, which it was but our teachers got very creative and came up with an idea; we will present over a Zoom call. I’m sure you will eventually end up using Zoom in these unpredictable times but Zoom allows you to video call with multiple people and provides excellent effects that make work more fun. 

When we heard that we will be present over a video call everyone was thinking to themselves “how are we going to do that” and quite frankly, so was I but I kept my growth mindset and took on the challenge. We had to adapt our solution due to the fact that all of our props were still at schools and we couldn’t access it we had to make do with what we had at home. For us that meant the rover couldn’t have been used as our team choice element, it took us quite a long time to figure out what we will do instead and I came up with an idea to find a note from ground control that changes the perspective of the two astronauts. We also didn’t know how we would display our background which was a very important part and without it we wouldn’t look like we were on the moon. This is where we took the advantage of the features Zoom provides and changed our virtual background to the moon, we thought this was very clever but it turns out every group did this. We used a total of five backgrounds that we all shared and they really helped tell the story. The biggest change we made however was the unseen character, instead of an alien from last time Josh made himself a Russian astronaut which I thought was much better because it had some kind of story behind it. 

Now that we made all of our edits and adapted it so it would work online we practiced. We had to get used to changing the background on time and muting ourselves when we weren’t speaking, after a few rehearsals we got the hang of it and it went smoothly. It was eventually our time to present and I felt much better than last time, probably because there was only a few people watching but also because of our improvements. I was really hoping the teachers noticed our changes because we thought hard on them and it turns out that they loved them. After our eight minutes was up I was a bit I upset that we couldn’t present it to actual appraisers and other teams because I felt like we did a really good job and made it much better than last time.

I can finally say without lying that I’m looking forward to the next Destination Imagination but I’m sure I’m not going to forget this one of a kind experience. I’m proud to say that I was apart of the first ever online DI.