Through the past weeks, my team an I have been working on solving our Destination Imagination Challenge. Thought this time there has been many aspects that I have enjoyed. One aspect that stands out from the rest is the making of our game gizmo. I took on this challenge single handedly, and spent countless hours perfecting it. The part that I enjoyed the most was presenting the game gizmo and technical element to the appraisers at the Destination Imagination Regional tournament. The game gizmo helped shape our teams solution by ticking of some of the major boxes that the appraisers were scoring us on. One thing I would do differently is to split the work load evenly.
People in my group like Jessie, Adlih, and me contributed more because, we decided to offer our time early on. The only way we could have changed this is if the other group members had been adamant about helping with our tasks or pick other tasks to work on. This would have led us to creating better team choice elements. I was a little frustrated with how my team worked, or didn’t work on our project. I chose a task very early on which occupied most of my time, even though I pitched in when I could. On some nights I would put hours into fixing the game gizmo, working on the technical element, and practicing my lines.
I honestly can’t complain compared to Jessie’s work load. She single handily pulled together the script and the container, bringing our idea to life. For the provincial tournament we definitely need to split up the work as close to “evenly” as we can. I personally have been working on a lot of different aspects of my team challenge. Some of the main ideas that I have been working on are the main game gizmo design and, one of our team choice elements, a short song. I have learned many lessons from both of these ideas and will summarize my findings. When creating the game gizmo I put a lot of work and thought into the design aspect. It is difficult to build anything substantial without a plan, so immediately I got to work.
When I created my first blueprint I found a fatal flaw. I designed the function of the gizmo, and the “look”of the gizmo, but had no way to successfully incorporate my idea into the story. I worked with Jessie right from the start so that the game gizmo would be well integrated into the theme, and not such a stretch to connect as it had been in previous years. Another decision I made during the process of creating the gizmo was that the quality needed to be a top priority, to be precise, no cardboard.
Even though this material is abundant , it is way to floppy. The sooner I had my materials the better, so I set out to a couple different stores to find the right materials. I landed on foam core, mini coloured popsicle sticks, and paint. This wasn’t the hard part, I still had to bring my creation to life. This required creating perfect circles, dividing them into ten, and lots of exact cutting. As a group we came up with the idea that we could integrate “the game of life spinner” into a hat so that my character would be part of the game gizmo. This will require a lot of revision and planning, but I’m up for the challenge. I have also been working on lyrics for a song that will be activated through the bottom of a cane. This has been quite challenging since I don’t want it to sound like a jingle, or a hit pop song. Also, since I don’t have the music yet, I’m stringing the lyrics loosely across a 4/4 scale.
One skill that I did not know how to do when we started this project, was the creation, and the exact division of a circle into multiple pie slices. This skill took a lot of trial and error before I was confident enough to use it for the creation of my game gizmo. When you use this skill the first element that you need to consider is the length of the radius of your circle. To create the perfect circle you need to place a pin down on the centre of the soon to be circle and connect a string to the side of a pencil. The string should be exactly the size of the radius. By pulling the string tight and slowly moving the pencil around the centre point you will get your perfect circle. The next part of this skill is the division of your circle. It would be helpful to draw a diameter line from both sides of your circle. Next you will decide the number of pie slices that you want your circle to be and divide that number by 180˚. This will give you the degrees of each section. Then I needed to bring in my knowledge of geometry, with the use of protractors etc. to accurately measure the correct angles. It was extremely satisfying to connect what I have learned in math to a design project.