Hi everyone, today I will be writing about a project we recently finished. This project was called Destination Imagination.”DI” is all about critical thinking and thinking quickly. The main goal of DI is to find a solution to the challenge that you get. There are 4 different challenges; Technical, Scientific, Engineering, and Artistic. Normally, we would present our challenge solutions at tournaments, however due to Covid, we created videos.

My challenge was Technical and my partners were: Cooper, Aaron, Julian, Ben T., and Declan. Our group name was: “Technically Happy”.

Here’s what our challenge required:

 

Now for DI there isn’t just one challenge to solve, there are two. Along with the main challenge there is an Instant challenge. Each group had a different Instant challenge, some challenges were in Presentation format, and some were in  Creation format.

 

Also, to prepare for this “Instant challenge”, we did many practice challenges to get ready. These challenges tested us to work together as a group well, but also in a quick manner. That’s the thing about instant challenges is speed, and if this were a normal year, we wouldn’t have as much time to prepare for the challenge. More on the practices, we acted as objects for the scenery, and we rarely got to use literal objects. This was good help since we had to do the same thing for the real Instant challenge.

 

My group got a “Presentation” type of challenge for the Instant challenge. Looking back, I think that we could’ve been better prepared, however I think we acted our roles well.

 

 

 

 

 

Our first task, which was pretty hard: was creating our own Basecamp Project. Actually creating it wasn’t hard but organizing our work by ourselves instead of the teachers was hard.

 

We then started to meet our challenge requirements and we had to fill out lots of worksheets.

 

I think that it took a while for our group to develop ideas and it was quite frustrating at first.

After many out-of school Zoom calls we had a full rough script to show our teacher. We had many good ideas and a long script which would be good in the long-run because some of our ideas wouldn’t be included.

 

The next step was to do a quick rough run through of the script and present to our teacher. This led us to assign roles for the characters and I chose to be the “guide”.

We didn’t have all of the tools and props at that time so the critique/ recommendations were pretty straightforward. At this time, we hadn’t started any filming we were just going through things and exploring all options.

 

 

In the middle of all of this, we were creating our Team Poster.

Here’s our design;

 

We took a photo with all of us gathered around the poster, unfortunately I don’t have that picture.

 

During the next few weeks, my group filmed the video and worked on the overall visuals of the video. Since our video didn’t have many literal materials, (it was mostly CGI), our work doubled. For example, we created a HUD, a health bar, and different sets. And of course, the editing was very extensive.

Like before, we brought a rough draft and presented it to our teacher. At that point, our video was only 3 minutes long and we had 5 minutes! So we already knew there was more work to be done. Our teacher recommended that we add subtitles since sone of the audio overlapped. Also, that we make things that are happening more clear.

 

During the last week, we added the finishing touches, as well as making a Q&A video explaining the process of our video solution.

In response to the critique that we got, we added an introduction explaining what had happened to this adventurer. That rounded our video to exactly 4:59 out of the 5 minutes we were limited to.

Now finally, here is our video solution!

 

 

And here is our Q&A video!

 

We placed 1st for our main solution and also 1st for our Instant Challenge!

 

 

 

 

 

In summation, I think everyone that did this project would agree that it was a lot of work. However, seeing and being proud of the final product made me realize that all of the work was worth it. Looking back, I think my group and I could’ve gotten more points by making the scenes more clear, and by incorporating more real materials. I also think that we could’ve assigned roles better, instead of putting all of the work on 1 or 2 people. The things we did well was working efficiently, and working well together. We also spent many out of school hours working on this project.

 

Thanks for reading today’s blog!