Destination imagination learning portfolio post

The DI regionals happened a week ago, and I think they went really well for us. If you don’t know what DI (Destination imagination) is, there is a website all about it here. Anyways, as I was saying, it actually went pretty well. The challenge our group was doing was the technical challenge on target, where we had to make a flying vehicle that drops a payload in a designated area, all while having a story about exploring a remote place that relates to our aircraft. I was put in a group with five other people, Ryan, Meg, Ally, Anders, and Brenton. First we had to design our aircraft, and we ended up deciding on a quadcopter drone. We decided to build it from scratch, as we’d get more points if we made our own drone instead of buying one. We still had to buy parts for our drone, so we started to find out what we needed. We ordered batteries, motors, escs, flight controllers, and more. We also made a drop system using an electromagnet. We spent while trying to figure out how to make it work, but it kept breaking on us, so in the last three days before the tournament we switched it from a drone to a blimp that used helium balloons, and that decision actually worked out pretty well for us, because it was much easier to build and we were able to for the most part finished in time for the tournament, although our drop system broke at the last second.

For the story we did it so that it was some astronauts exploring an alien planet, and basically they get stranded there and they need to repair their radio, so they go to a cave but a crystal knocks out one of the astronauts, so the other astronaut takes the crystal and leaves the cave, and they use the crystal to fix the radio and call help, and they use the supplies the blimp drops to help the injured explorer. Thats just a brief overview, you can see it in detail in the video of our performance:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eexp-qocm0Q

We also had to do an instant challenge, where you have a few minutes to do a random task, it went alright, but our teamwork could have been better. I can’t talk about the specifics of the challenge until after the global DI tournament, because they reuse the challenges. I still felt like the entire thing went better than expected, because the blimp actually flew, even though we were only working on it for three days, and the story went well, and even though the drop system didn’t work and our instant challenge didn’t go the greatest, we still placed third out of seven teams, which I’m pretty happy with.

Now that me and my group has learned from this experience, there are things we are going to change for the provincial tournament. We are going to fix the drop system so that it, you know, actually works, and we are going to revise the story so that we can earn more points for the dramatic portrayal of the character and the integration of the drone into the story. Anyways, I’m going to be posting another post about how the provincials go after they happen, so bye for now.