This year was my last year in DI in review, probably the hardest one that I have ever done. For some reason the challenge for technical this year involved building an aircraft and dropping five payloads over a drop zone. Originally when I signed up for it with my group of: Logan, Daniel, Luca, Melika and Isabelle, I thought it would be no different than last years technical challenge where we had to deliver payloads but with a ground vehicle. I was very wrong as when Logan, Daniel and I tried to build a successful drone over the preparation period it was a complete disaster for the most part. But I’m going to get to that later.  

The team that I was in worked well together except for when we were split into different roles and there was little if any coordination or communication. Still, we divided the work into two groups with half of us working on the drone and payloads and the other working on the team choice elements and our story.

 

The story went through a few drafts but the final one was about time travelers from the future gettIng artifacts from 2019 via a flying drone that would pass through a portal. However I can’t give much insight into the story’s production or the backdrop that we used as I didn’t work on them. I did work on the drone the most though so I can give a lot of details on that. 

The plane was something I had a lot of confidence going into but in reflection it was more out of ignorance. I had ideas that it would work eventually if we built our own and eventually I realized that it is really hard to make a plane out of styrofoam if you have no experience in aerodynamics. After realizing that the plane was not going to work without us instantaneously gaining knowledge on the complicated topic overnight we switched to a drone to do it and ended up just trying to attach a payload to the drone. 

In the end as you can clearly see if you look at our scores the drone didn’t work as well as I was hoping. It suddenly stopped working before we performed which we thought originally was the magnets interfering with the internal compass but we had just switched the propellers in the wrong direction which we found out about later. 

We did do well on our Instant challenge but I can’t talk about that.