Hello!

Destination Imagination.

Those two rhyming words have been the main (and let’s be honest; only) focus of PLP 8 and 9 for the past month.
Actually, I don’t think those words rhyme. Or if they do, it’s an imperfect rhyme.

Rhymes are confusing. Let’s get to the point.

Assonance aside, this was a wild ride. Let me explain it to those of you who are not Ms. Willemse.

Side note: I am splitting this post into 3 parts: Planning, Creating, and Presenting. This is going to be a massive post.

Part 1: Planning

In this year’s DI tournament, there were five challenges: Scientific, Fine Arts, Improv, Technical, and Engineering.

My group (Nate, Quinn, Indy, Annie and me) were given the Technical challenge. It… was a lot.

Learn more about it in this (rather cheesy) video. I already wrote 2 other blog posts today and I am too lazy to explain this now.

So now you’ve presumably watched that video, and we can get on with the show.

Part 1: Planning

My group didn’t have trouble working together, but coming up with ideas was a struggle for us. Just figuring out our team name was difficult, let alone an invention or impact scenery. We went through several before settling on Tie DI for no particular reason other than the fact that it sounded cool.

There were a lot of complicated rules to follow, so we set about reading the Rules of the Road, a massive document detailing every regulation and guideline. There were a lot. It took a really long time to read, and by the time I got to the end I’d forgotten them all.

Next we started brainstorming ideas for a problem. “You can’t have a solution without a problem!” said Ms. Willemse, so we got to work. After interviewing other students, using brainstorming techniques, and a bunch of random discussion about trees falling on Nate, we thought of a problem that all of us had whenever we woke up in the morning: alarm clocks.

You know how when your alarm clock goes off, sometimes you just turn it off and keep sleeping, and then you’re late to school/work/whatever you do? Maybe you don’t do that, but it just so happens that all of us are teenagers, so we all sleep late.

Anyways, that was our problem. We had a couple ideas about how to solve it, but none of them were both achievable and creative, so we scrapped them. Eventually, a new solution was proposed: solving a puzzle in order to turn off the alarm. That way, to user would have to use their brain when they woke up, so they would be more awake afterwards. It was the first idea that all of us agreed on, so we decided to roll with it.

After coming up with the designs, and a bit more refining, we moved on to…

Part 2: Creating

This part was the most difficult. At this point we had a basic idea of what we were going to do, and we started to source materials. I became the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) in charge of the Impact Scenery (watch the video). In my opinion, that’s one of the hardest ones.

We also had DRIs for the invention, the story, and both team choice elements.

Figuring out materials was hard. The invention needed to be sturdy, so we decided to use wood. It ended up being WAY to hard to cut, so Quinn brought it to his grandpas house over the weekend to use his power tools.

The structure of the impact scenery was one of the biggest challenges I faced. In the end my mum was nice enough to take me to a hardware store to get PVC pipes, which were sort of floppy but also a life-saver, because they allowed us to hang a sheet from them to create our scenery.

Our house looks really messy in this photo. It’s not usually this messy, I promise.

For our first Team Choice Element, Indy choreographed a dance to the music Another Day of Sun. Indy likes dance a lot, and when our team took an interests test, most of us scored highest on the physical movement aspect (by most of us I mean everyone except me).

Our second Team Choice Element was a painted panel on the front of our invention. When we went to Oregon as a class, We all visited the Yaquina Head Natural Area, and every single person took the exact same photo:

Since all of us shared that experience, we decided to paint the lighthouse onto the invention as a symbol of us as a team and the experiences we’ve shared. That sounds kind of cheesy, but we figured that it might make the Appraisers (judges) happy. I painted it on:

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I definitely isn’t anywhere near identical to the photo, but I think it captures the essence.

Annie and I worked together to write the script for the story. It got modified a lot once it was written, but the plot stayed generally the same:

  • Nate’s room. Nate has a hard time waking up. He turns off his alarm clock and keeps sleeping until his mom (Annie) comes and gets him out of bed. He rushes to school.
  • At school. Nate is reprimanded by the teacher (me) for being late. He is too tired to focus on his test, so he falls asleep.
  • Flashback. Nate’s alarm goes off and he jumps out of bed. He runs to school and meets up with his friends (Indy and Quinn). They have dance class and perform Another Day Of Sun.
  • End Of Flashback. Quinn pokes Nate, telling him to wake up. Indy suggests that they meet after school to make a new alarm clock for Nate.
  • Nate’s room. The three friends are tinkering with wood. Indy suggests a puzzle, as it will make Nate think. Nate falls asleep and the friends complete the alarm.
  • Nate wakes up to the sound of his new alarm. He solves the puzzle and is awake.
  • Office. Nate is at a job interview. He is asked questions by his future boss (me).
  • The End.

It was ok, I guess. It makes more sense in real life.

Finally, Quinn made a circuit for the alarm. It worked pretty well, and after a couple practices we were ready to go!

Part 3: Presenting

Finally, the fateful day arrived. We arrived at school, bright and early, and set up our station. After an opening ceremony, in which we paraded around the gymnasium holding our team sign, we went to go do our challenge. We were first in the Middle Level Technical challenge, so we got our presentation over relatively quickly without too much lead-up or suspense, which was nice.

The following video is our presentation. Watch with caution: you may feel nauseous or your eyes may burn after seeing this monstrosity.

So. What was that.

Plenty of things went wrong with that performance. For one thing, the alarm didn’t work. Annie had to play a sound effect off her phone in order for the show to keep going. Another thing was the impact scenery, which sort of partially fell over, and the city-scape thing only was able to pull up part way (that was a city-scape, if you were confused).

It failed, but at the same time it succeeded, in a way. We managed to get through the presentation, no one forgot their lines, and my sister said that it was relatable, so that’s good.

Honestly, I’m not proud of what we created; I think we could have practiced more, revised the impact scenery, and been more careful of the invention so as to not damage it right before the presentation. But we did our best with the time we had, and put hours and hours of work into it, so I don’t feel too bad about it.

There’s always Provincials to look forward to!

Sigh.

Whew! That was one of my longer posts.

I just realized that there was no driving question in this post. Weird! I looked all around the project overview and couldn’t find one.

Anyways.

Though this was a flop, and we have plenty of revisions to make, we did our best, and that’s what matters. I’ll see you at Provincials!

Cheers,

Evelyn 👩🏽