Have you ever wondered what will happen once earth is completely destroyed? What would happen to us humans? Where would we go? 

That is a question I was aiming to answer while floating around space on a random Saturday in March.  

If you are thinking, ‘Tyler, there is no way you were in space’. You would be correct, however, I was acting as if I was, as Conrad the astronaut, during the 2025 Destination Imagination regional tournament.

What is Destination Imagination?!

Destination Imagination (DI) is a global academic competition. Teams of all ages develop solutions to challenges and present them live at tournaments. This year we had a choice of 4 challenges, technical, fine arts, engineering, and scientific (my challenge).

Worlds Beyond – 2025 Scientific Challenge

Our Solution

Activism is a very important thing to me and during the process of educating myself about that I have learned as lot of things about colonization. My group and I came up with the idea of creating a story around colonization.

Conrad and Jerry were sent to space on a mission to ‘save human kind’. Earth was being destroyed and it was their duty to find a new planet. They start to lose hope when their space ship detects resources on a nearby planet, they land and immediately call it home. However, that was short lived, for an alien comes along excited to welcome them to their planet. Conrad and Jerry get very defensive claiming ‘this is our planet, we were here first’. The aliens throw a welcome ceremony for the aliens, they sing them a song and show them their national sport. Conrad is sure they are trying to go to war, mistaking the song for a battle call and the sports field for a battle field, but Jerry is starting to question Conrads antics. It’s only when Conrad pulls out a gun that Jerry confronts him, telling him not to do this. Conrad doesn’t listen and shoots both and Alien and then…Jerry. He breaks down, he got so lost in his own greed that he forgot his values he almost stole these kind aliens home and worst of all he almost killed his best friend and now earth is going to be destroyed with everyone on it.
How will this story end? What will happen to Conrad? Will Jerry and the Aliens forgive him? Will earth be destroyed? Find out by watching it right here, on my YouTube channel:

Team Choice Elements

Part of the requirements for our challenge was to include 2 team choice elements. Team choice elements are things that show off our team’s interests, skills, areas of strength, and talents. This could be anything we wish, including props, music, technical gadgets, costumes, physical actions, etc.

We Love Our Orb – The Song

For our first team choice element we decided to rewrite the song ‘Earth’ as our own and sing it as well as play guitar for it. I think this was an amazing addition to our solution, it sounded amazing and really impressed the judges.

Hyperball – The Sports Game

Everyone is my group is very active and play a lot of sports. We decided to create a new game combining all of the sports we love. It was a mix of basketball, soccer, hockey, and football. 

How did I Improve From Last Year

Communication and Collaboration

This year we had way way less time to create our solutions, however, it didn’t feel as such. I was way less stressed, I didn’t feel like I had the world weighing on my shoulder. This was because of how successful my group and I were at communicating and collaborating. A huge goal I have had for many years now is to improve me communication and collaboration skills while working with peers. In the past I have struggled with trusting others in doing work that is up to my standards, which leads to me taking on all of the work in group projects. 

I have been really reflecting and working on this and I believe I showed great success in Destination Imagination this year. 

While working with my group I went out of my comfort zone and I put trust on my peers. Because of this we were able to spread the work out among all of us and no specific person did a drastic amount more than anyone else. We of course had some struggles but rather than me just immediately taking on the work, we had a team meeting and discussed our team contract. Doing this we were able to make an action plan which set us back on track.

F.A.I.L (First Attempts in Learning)

Instant Challenge 

We had an insanely successful DI solution this year, If I were to do anything different I would change how we did during the instant challenge. Last year we were very prepared for our instant challenge, this year we didn’t practice once. During the challenge, we lost track of time, and forgot many key elements. Going forwards we are going to practice a lot before provincials and we are going to assign eachother roles (point manager, time manager, etc) so we can be prepared and get a high score.

Thanks for Reading!

Make sure to come back in April to read about my experience in provincials.  Also, hear my group members perspectives of regionals by reading their blogs here:

Sydnee G

Kennedy L

Charlie B

Siena J