Destination Imagination

So we just finished the biggest project of the year Destination Imagination. Here is some basic information on how D.I works, Destination Imagination (DI) is a project based, kid-driven program that teaches kids to be innovative problem solvers. Using STEAM, teams of students collaborate, think outside the box and create unique solutions to one of seven different challenges in preparation for a fun, problem-solving competition. In PLP we do DI every year till  grade 10 but this year was the first year where we actually had real DI since last year we did it online and submitted a video.

There were 4 categories (technical, fine arts, improv and science) that you could get put it then you would be in a random group for that category. I was put into the technical group with Landon, Colton, Patrick and Max. We were tasked with creating a “daring escape” where we had to make 2 different vehicles and cleared 3 different obstacles. We knew this would be a challenge from the start since we had the smallest group in all of PLP only having 5 people, every other team had 7.

The first thing our group would have to do is to establish roles and responsibilities for our main presentation and instant challenge. Essentially this roles split up a lot of the work and made the work load so much easier.

One thing that was worth a lot of points was the story part of the performance. We went on a Group FaceTime call and just shot up ideas and pieced together and very very unfinished story. It was a good starting point that we could work on and make a lot better. Over the rest of the time we had to worked a lot on the project and started to polish it.

From our story we already had a bit of an ideas on what vehicles we’d make, but we still had to brainstorm quite a bit. We decided to meet up outside of school multiple times and get to work. For the technical aspect of our project we made two machines, 1 was powered by electricity and a motor, we used Lego mind-storm and a R/C receiver and the other was powered by gravity (we just used a ramp) We next had to create our 3 obstacles we decided on making a tunnel made out of cardboard, rough terrain made of assorted Lego and movable objects made of painted bottles.

We got back from spring break and thought everything was going fine, we had a dress rehearsal right away in conclusion it went horribly, our group was just not ready, our choreographing was bad, we didn’t have any costumes and the machines didn’t work. We realized that we had to get our stuff together and catch up, in the next week we spent so much time finishing the hazards and the vehicles. In the end we made it all work it was very unpolished but we did make it work.

The day of the tourney was so excited but we were all nervous we wanted to do some run throughs before the competition just to be ready, so we met up before hand to run through our script and pack up the car and prepare, and finally we were off we headed off to Saint Georges High School. We arrived and had to wait till it was our time to present it was so nerve racking just waiting for the time to tick down

Finally it was time, unfortunately the machines did not work out on the electricity powered vehicle the wheel fell off and the other vehicle did not make it through the tunnel. All though the machines did not work out the story and performance went well, and we were pretty happy with it.

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