While our attempt at regionals went poorly our final try at provincials for DI in 2019 went only a bit better. 

As I mentioned in my previous post at DI regionals my group didn’t get the scores we were aiming for after having difficulty getting our aircraft to fly. When it came to doing it again I was hoping that we wouldn’t have the same issues. 

For provincials we changed up our plane design, this time attaching a rope to the bottom of the aircraft with tape and putting a magnet and a paper clip on the end. These were meant to loosely hold out paper payload to the drone and break apart and drop it when we got to the drop zone. It worked in practice but when we got to the event it stopped working and Melika had to grab the payloads from the drone in the drop zone as they would not drop themselves. We did even better on our instant challenge this time which I still can’t talk about. 

I think that there isn’t much to discuss in terms of what we did to make our performance better other than the drone improvements. We didn’t actually do anything over spring break and all the designing and building of the improvements was done in the last week before the big day. If I were to do things again I would have had at least one group meeting over spring break as just like in regionals there was little to no communication from group members leaving us unprepared when we arrived. 

Part of our failure I would put on the challenge we chose as making an aircraft was out of our capabilities and buying a good one or even the parts to make a good one would have taken a lot of extra money. We saw some teams with their own drones that they had made or bought with the exemption of one crossbow thing and two balloons. 

Our scores

I can’t say I’m really satisfied with this years DI performance but I would rather not do it again next year.