DI provincials learning portfolio post
We’re finally finished with DI, as the provincials tournament was on the 6th of April. Before I start talking about what actually happened, i want to talk about what we added to our presentation. The drone/blimp was pretty much the same, as was the backdrop, but the main changes were to the story. Basically, the group of explorers had been calling in supply drops, but they forget to bring in the supplies one night, so they get destroyed by a storm, and they have to call in another supply drop. But then they find out that they can’t call one in because their radio is broken, so then they have to go find a battery so that they can repair their radio. They take a rover (this was one of the other things we added, it’s a wooden buggy with painted cardboard sides. We were going to play music from a speaker attached to it, but that didn’t exactly work out during our actual presentation.
) to find a battery, but a storm picks up and they have to shelter in a cave. They see a weird crystal, so they break off a piece of it, but then some gas comes out and makes one of the explorers fall unconscious. The second explorer grabs a piece of the crystal, but when she gets back to the base, she finds out that the scientist who stayed behind can use the crystal to fix the radio. Then they fix the radio, get some supplies (this is when the drone/blimp drops our payloads) and then revive their companion. At least, that was supposed to happen. The day before the challenge me and group members Ryan and Brenton stayed up till 12 doing last minute adjustments on the rover and drone/blimp. The day of the tournament, things were starting to go wrong with the drone. We thought we had fixed the drone just before we were called in, and you can see what happened in this video. As you can see, it didn’t exactly work out as we thought it would. The drone didn’t work, and that affected the story, and we didn’t get to show the rover as much as we had wanted to. I am still quite happy with the result however, because without the entire groups quick thinking and improv, it could easily have been much worse. We ended up with third place out of about ten teams, which I think is due in part to that we won first place for the instant challenge, which I can’t talk about here until after globals.
Overall, I am very happy with the result of the provincial tournament, because we placed much higher than I originally thought we would. And from a reflection standpoint, destination imagination was a very good experience, as I grew my teamwork, productivity, and brainstorming skills, as well as my basic understanding of electronics. I also grew some money-management skills, as this was a very expensive challenge to do, but overall, I would try it again, as long as I have a team as good as the one I had this year. That’s it for this post, the links to the members of the group are here: Ryan’s blog, Brenton’s blog, Ally’s blog, Anders’s blog, and Meg’s blog.