DI Regionals

Hello and welcome back to another blog post! This is probably going to be a relatively short one, but don’t let that fool you as this post has been months in the making.

This is a post about Destination Imagination¹, which is a competition where teams create and present solutions to challenges, heavily focusing on S.T.E.A.M elemets.

DI officially started for us² sometime in January, when we picked which challenge we wanted to compete in. We were presented with the following choices:

• Engineering, where we would have to create a modular device that accurately launches a beanbag, and tell a story of everything going to plan until a catalyst occurs
• Technical, where we would have to create a large pinball machine where a small soccer ball moves around, and tell a story about a hero’s extraordinary quest.
• Fine arts, where we’d bring a visual art piece to life, tell a story with it, and create kinetic art.
• Scientific, where we’d “uncover” an artifact, investigate its history, and present our findings through a story and a puppet character.

After a bit of thought, I settled on Engineering, and submitted that to the teachers. We didn’t hear much more about it until around a month later, when we finally got our groups.

Once we were in our group, we got the challenge details³, read over them and then started planning. We started with story concepts, which our group was great at coming up with. After a bit of back and forth we came up with an angry bird style story set in the cold war, fought between American birds and Soviet pigs, then we changed to it being upper class Pigs, versus lower class birds, and finally, we dropped the angry birds part. Our modular device went through a few iterations, in the planning stage, but most of the improvements came after we actually built and tested it. Our first configuration was a slingshot, and our second was a catapult. Our transformation initially involved disassembling the device almost entirely, before we realized that was very time consuming⁴ so we switched to just flipping it upside down, adding a catapult arm and moving some elastics around.

An early version of the catapult configuration:

The script was one of the most challenging parts to create as I initially wrote the script for 6 people, but as we got closer to the competition, we learned that the two grade 10 members of our team wouldn’t be at the tournament so I had to rewrite it for 4 people.

The presentation went surprisingly well, considering that we had only done 1 full rehearsal before it, and most of our props and costumes had been made only two or so days before.

Our story went well, but we got stuck on the launches, as I kept misfiring and it took a while to figure out why. My teammates did a great job of improvising to fill the space, but sadly, we didn’t have time to finish our story. I also think our instant challenge went well. For next time, I think we should focus on generating more ideas if possible, and keeping better track of time.

Overall, the Destination Imagination regional tournament went quite well⁵ but I still think there is a fair bit both our team, and I could make. The weeks leading up to it were very stressful, and I think better distribution of work, and communication will be key when preparing for provincials, as we will need to really refine our props and costumes. I think communication is imporrant I often felt as if I was doing a lot of the work, and whenever I tried to organize meetings, or ask questions, I wouldn’t get responses making teamwork difficult⁶. My team did pull through right before DI, and I hope we can keep that energy going forward.⁷

As I said, this was a short post but as DI still isn’t over, you can expect to see a provincials blog post soon, with more details on our solution.

Two posts in 1 day, crazy right? ⁸