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So, DI is back, and more stressful then ever. This is my second Destination Imagintion post for grade 10, in the last one I give a bigger explanation about my group and our challenge. Just in case you missed that riveting blog post, here’s a link to it.
Mike mentioned in that post, we were in the engineering challenge. In that challenge we had to make a structure, a story, and present it all in a very DI way. By that I mean it had 1,000,000 rules that we had to follow, but we did it. That challenge this year is called drop zone. The name comes from how you have to drop weights on your structure instead of placing the weights like we have done in previous years. Here is a video that explains the challenge in more detail and more enthusiasticly then I ever could.
And, like I said earlier this isn’t our second go with our team. Our team being Tender Greens, consisting of myself, Ruby, Mimi, Claire, Michael, and Ryan. Our first performance went well. We were on home soil, at Seycove Secondary and even ended up in 3rd place in our category. I was very proud of how it turned out, and I am going to show our performance. I am going to show it because it is good. I’ll leave it at that.
So, that went pretty well. Hooray. We had things to fix though, the script was a bit long, and our scene to scene transitions were a bit sloppy and in coordinated. Good thing we ha a month to work on them. Oh, and also, the appraisals take your structure that you have built, and break it right in front of you after the presentation. So, we needed a new one of those too. That was my main job. To remake our structure. I made it out of cork, and because it had to have a 41/2” hole in it, I decided to make it a cylinder. If you look in my box of cork and things you can see that I experimented with many kinds of cork, rubber bands, glue, tape and more.
All of that was good, but I needed up using large sheets like you can see in the back to make my structure. To hold the cylinder together I used epoxy. Epoxy is made from a class of synthetic thermosetting polymers containing epoxide groups. In English that means it’s very sticky and holds strong. After my dad taught me how to use it, I was good to go and make a series of prototypes to test, weigh and more. This wa s the final prototype that in the end became our structure.
I drilled holes to reduce the weight, because the main part of the structure was that it had to weigh less that 175g. It met that. Don’t worry.
Ankthw big building piece that I was involved with was the event depictor. This had to be a technical masterpiece, it had to have a combination of store bought and made items to all in the end help the story. We made a podium. Throughout the performance characters use it as a presentation spot, a desk, and a teaching platform, but ultimately it’s purpose is to play sound. It plays ominous music when the tension builds and it also has sound affects throughout. It started as a podium built by Michael. Then I wired it with speakers to make the noise.
So, that was the technical part. Now, we had to worry about the transitions and script shortening. As far as the transitions went all we really had to do was to plan out how many chairs we needed in each scene, and who would carry them in our out. As for shortening the script, there is a pretty useless scene where Claire and Ryan’s characters are talking about how Claire presentation will go. We didn’t think it was necessary so we added a similar conversation onto the end of a scene that already existed a.m. day got rid of the whole scene, this gave Michael more lines and us more time.
Over the years, DI has always had something go horribly wrong with my team. In grade 8 our structure was too big so we had to remodel day of, in grade 9 we were judged very harshly, and grade 10? Well. Grade 10 was a doozy. Do you want to know what went wrong? Everything. It all started with the speakers. They weren’t working, so I wired it again and again and still, nothing. Until, with hours left until our presentation I realizzed that the tiny little piece of our aux cable had snapped, and was lodged in our radio. This piece. \/
Thag piece is no smaller than a fingernail. And it gave me anxiety for about 3 hours. We had to tape the back of the chord so that the shaft of the aux still made contact with the wire. I don’t have any photos of it because I was so frantically trying to fix it that no one dared take a photo of me, and photos were the last thing on my mind then. Ok. Calm down. 😑. So. After that was fixed, we were presenting and things were starting to look up. But, I’m classic DI fashion, everything went wrong. The speakers hade absolutely no noise, so that meant no team depictor and no team choice element, gone. Then there was the structure. It was exactly the same as the last one, all the way down to the height and weight. But what didn’t it do? Hold weight. That thing folded like a lawn chair. To this day, I have no idea why or how. Here’s is how we were judged.
Yes that third note says “Good recovery from technological failure.” Remember these people are called ‘Appraisers.’ No praise there. Just “Technological failure.” But, anyway at least in the end I got the experience. Not everything goes your way all the time, in fact it tends to be the opposite and you just have to live with that. DI will come back as a positive and I know that after seeing a grade 12 student get a DI scholarship just last week. So, even though it makes me sad to think about, this little certificate will be nothing but a positive for my future.
This is my third year of DI, I have done Engineering every year, but this year has been the best for me. I gained the most out of it, I leaned more about failure and how luck is not often on your side, especially when you think it will be. So, next year we are not doing DI. We will be done. We will live with the affects. I don’t know if they will be negative or positive, but I see both. DI advertises a study done in 2014, Dr. Mark A. Runco, Professor of Educational Psychology for the Torrance Creativity Center at the University of Georgia said he found these things about children who had done DI.
Do I agree with everything? No. I think that he shone light on all of the positive that we gain in the long term, but fails to mention what is wrong. I do not have a problem with him or the study though, I have a personal thing with DI called bad luck. Maybe I’m cursed, maybe I’m just whiny, but in the end I’m too sassy to agree right now, even though one day I will most likely feel the same. Thanks Dr. Mark.
