DI, which stands for Destination Imagination, is a tournament where schools around the world compete with one another. Thousands of kids compete to win trophies, show their intelligence, and show their skills. DI isn’t an easy competition, which takes lots of skill and leadership to master.
In the beginning of DI, before I got my rolls and guides, I was put in a team of six. I didn’t know some of the people but I knew the others because one was my friend and the others I’ve been with in school.
The first thing we did as a team was getting to know each other and what special skills and knowledge we had.
The second thing we did was understanding what DI was. Our teacher explained it to us in a very exciting way, which made me think that this was going to be a super fun project and a really cool learning opportunity for us (and man was I wrong).
After a couple of days learning about DI and getting to know our teammates, we got into our challenges. Each team would have a different challenge from one another where they had to figure out many steps along the way.
Our challenge was to create a video presentation that tells a story about a scientific law that can be bent or broken. The scientific law had to be a nature law which could be observable. We had until the beginning of Spring Break to finish and hand in our video
We thought about what natural law we could use, like the tectonic plates law, Newton’s law of gravity, and many more. In the end we chose to use the Newton’s law of gravity.
After weeks and weeks of planing and sorting out every teammates job, we created a documentary involving basketball where an unexplainable event occurs. We didn’t just do one big challenge in DI. Some days we would do instant challenges, which are small challenges that our teacher would give us, and then we would have about 5 to 7 minutes to think and practice our challenge. This was so that we could show our thinking, listening skills, creativity, and our leadership skills.
After two weeks planning and discussing about our challenge we had finally come to a conclusion on how the story is going to play. Here are the steps. First we would show a montage of pictures involving with the story, then the narrator would explain who were the two main characters of this story. The main characters are two kids who love to play basketball every day, each day they would walk down to the basketball court together and talk about random things.
As they played basketball, one of them asked why the ball falls down instead of flying upward when you bounce it. They didn’t understand why is falls, but luckily there was a kid in the corner who knew the answer. She would stand up and explain how it falls and what the thing is that makes it fall (which is Gravity). Then it would cut to a professional scientist named Johnny Gravity who would explain the laws of gravity and his life’s work.
Then, the next day the two kids went back to play basketball and the unexplainable event occurs. As they were playing basketball, one of the kids bounces the ball but it hits their foot which causes the ball to roll down the court to the open door. They run after the ball but they couldn’t find it anywhere. A bystander saw the ball flying upwards. The bystander would then take pictures of the amazing event that happened in front of them and post it to the news app. Seven years later the two kids and the bystander would go on a TV show and have an interview with a reporter who would ask them how they felt and what was their reaction when the event happened in front of them.
Cuts to the narrator who would say that after all this time no one could explain this unexplainable event.