Destination Imagination is a project based program hoping to unleash the creative power in children’s minds. I had the opportunity to be able to take part in DI this year and this blog post is about how it went. We started this project near the end of semester 1 and had about a week of in class time to get to know our group and plan our project for the next 2 months. I was put in the technical team where we made a pinball machine but instead of using a pinball we used a soccer ball. Being in the pinball team meant we were a very heavy on building team because we had to make a very large size pinball machine. Our group built at James’s house and honestly wouldn’t have been able to do what we achieved without James.

Our first major setback was our lack of work being done. We would meet out of school but after hours of work we wouldn’t have a very good result. After fixing problems we had with the drill and our screws we started working at a faster pace. Something I think our group did well on especially compared to other groups is how often we met up outside of school. We met up most Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. Something we could have improved on was how complex we planed the machine to be.

We tried to fit too many ideas into our machine and at the last minute realized that we would have to scrap some ideas. DI is probably one of the most useful projects we’ve done in PLP so far. I can put doing DI in my resume and state how it’s grown my team building skills and my creative thinking. So a school project could help me get a job or get into a college. While I probably won’t ever be making a giant pinball machine in the future I will definitely be using skills I learned in this project.

This project improved my skills of working with a random group of people, sometimes with clashing ideas and how to find a solution that works for all of us. Our end result unfortunately couldn’t complete at pinball round but we got lots of points for risk taking with our complicated machine.

Going into provincials our group hopes to get a full pinball round by tweaking our design to work. We also will rehearse our play that goes with our pinball machine, learning to face the audience and project our voices, as well as switching up the play a bit to make it easier to follow. Something that went well was our instant challenge. Our group agreed we did a good job with our teamwork and learning to think quickly. Overall our group did pretty good and will hopefully do even better going into provincials and I learned a lot.