What’s DI?
As this is my second year in a row of taking part in this tournament, I’ve become a bit more familiar with what it’s all about. Briefly, Destination Imagination is a project in a sense, a project in which you are given a challenge from a category, my team was assigned the technical challenge. Within this challenge, you have a problem to solve, ours being, to create an aircraft that drops payloads. As well as the main piece of the challenge, there are also other components that we have to create such as the story, backdrop and team challenge elements that show off our teams interests and skills.
Preparation
Like last year, my team and I, used a brainstorming technique to find the outline of our story. We sat together as a team and threw out ideas.
Once we decided on the flow of the presentation, it was time to create our aircraft. From the very moment we were assigned this challenge, we knew that it would be a big challenge for our group.
Luca, Melika, and I wrote the story, created the payloads, and painted the backdrop (which we recycled from last years tournament). While Logan, Daniel, and Jaime figured out the aircraft construction.
Presentation
On the presentation day, we felt prepared in every section besides the aircraft. We had our lines down for the most part, and we had everything ready…except for the main part of our challenge. Unfortunately, right before we began our presentation our aircraft stopped flying properly, so that brought our presentation down by quite a lot. Our story, and acting went well, but because the aircraft was the main part of the presentation, it brought everything down.
When it came to our instant challenge, we are aware that we are best at performance based challenges. So, before entering we new that this would determine whether or not we were going to do well.
Because there was only one other team in our category for both the instant challenge and the overall challenge, we didn’t have much competition. We ended up with a first place ribbon.
Reflection + Change for Provincials
Our main, and most prominent revision before provincials, was our aircraft and our payloads. This element of the challenge, brought our challenge scores down a lot. In order to fix this part, we will have to figure out a completely new idea. We need the aircraft to fly, and drop, at least four of the payloads, in order to actually complete the challenge.
It will be difficult to be in communication with the group during Spring break, but we will make sure that major revisions are made to all sides of the presentation so that we are prepared for provincials next month.
In class, before spring break, we created burn charts for our team. How they work is, you list each part of your challenge (team choice elements, story, e.t.c.), and you chart how much, you need to improve out of a percentage.