Last weekend on April 8th 2018 I competed in the Destination Imagination provincials competition. If you don’t know what Destination imagination is, or haven’t seen my other post of this school years completions I suggest you read it. I explain in depth what my competition was about and talk about the the past, Regional competition.
So, I was in the Engineering challenge called The Drop Zone with Ruby, Mimi, Claire, Adam, Ryan and I. This challenge consisted of making a story, props, structures and presenting it with 2 team choice elements. Like I said in my other post, team choice elements are elements in the story in which the team shows general interests or strength in. The main aspect of the challenge consists of dropping weights on a structure and seeing how much weight the said structure can hold. Here’s the tournament project brief video that helped my group start our project:
Our story was about a teenager going through school with anxiety. We had a lot of fun creating a meaningful, impactful story about this student and we learned a lot about story telling: rising action, climax, falling action, etc. I also think this competition has brought my group members and I closer as friends and as school project partners. We learnt to recognize our team members strengths and weaknesses and planned our roles accordingly.
Here’s our team sign that Ruby made using an app called Superimpose.
So, at regionals our presentation went great and I was really happy everything worked out well, we came 3rd in our division! I was even more happy to see that people in the audience and some judges where “moved” by our performance because of the very real, anxiety aspect. But, not everything was perfect so we moved back to the drawing board for revisions. First of all, we ran out of time before we could finish the whole presentation, so we decided to change and take out some of the script. We added in more lines for my character (something I talked about in the end of my last DI post) and took out the unimportant parts of the script. We then brainstormed how we could get more weights on the structure without disrupting the climax of the story: Ruby would need to move a lot faster if we wanted to get the maximum amount of points in the weight category. Next we moved onto the problem with the projector. In our performance we used a projector to display images and videos onto a white sheet. The problem was that the white sheet was to flimsy and loose which caused it to form ripples when it was hanged up. To fix this we attached a pvc pipe to the bottom of the sheet to hold it down and keep it flat and tight. Finally we had to make a new structure because even though our structure didn’t break at the regionals tournament, they have to bust it open to see if we had cheated in any way… Adam built a new structure that was taller to help keep it more stable and used less epoxy glue to keep it light. We also found out that the less epoxy used on materials apparently makes them stronger and more durable. Within a week of returning back from spring break it was time to compete, and my group and I were all very confident that we would do well.
Before the competition we did countless practice runs to make sure everything was going to work perfectly. FYI, this is the part of the post that talks about the “series of unfortunate events”. While doing one of our practice runs we found out that one of our important cables for the audio had been busted.
(Adams blog)
Yea, that part of the cable was just missing. We had to temporarily fix it by just taping the remaining parts to the cable box. Other than that everything was working fine. We went into our presentation without a worry in our minds. The first red flag that something wasn’t going right was when one of our sound effects didn’t go off. Keep in mind that we had tested everything just 10 minutes before the performance. When it got to the part of the presentation that we projected the video onto the projector the sound wouldn’t play. This was our main team choice element and we were depending on it to boost our score. Ok, so the sound wasn’t working correctly, nor was the projected slides, but at least we still had our structure to gain us a lot of points. Ruby started putting weights on as fast as she could as we practiced, and as soon as we know it, it breaks. Just splits down the middle. Are you kidding me?! Nothing was working! It got me thinking why space shuttles always have a plan b, a second rout if there was a system failure. Anyways, we finished our presentation all pretty shaken. It was really annoying how nothing worked and how much time and effort we spent into making all the aspects of the story.
Even though our presentation messed up I’m still really proud of my group and I for incorporating such a powerful topic Into our performance. I think the audience thought that was the best part of the performance too, here’s our raw scores and some feedback we received from some of the appraisers:
Throughout the whole process of DI from grade 9 to now I would say that it has helped me with teamwork. All the steps of planning and creation really takes a lot of effort and it’s great to have a team backing you up. Not only that but I have learned how to work as a group member finding differences and skills and capitalizing on those skills. A resent study has come out on the Destination imagination website that shows the benefits DI can give students:
Now do I agree with it? For the most part, yes, I have learned how to be more engaged and imaginative when completing tasks, especially during the instant challenge portion of the tournament. As I mentioned before my teamwork skills have improved and I would say I am more confident. Would I recommend DI for every school? Only if the students wanted to perticipate. From my experiences DI has been a forced competition meaning that all PLP students must compete. After a while of late school nights and giving up days of planning it starts to feel like a chore, a chore I never chose. What do you think? Would u compete?
That’s all from me, thanks!
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