We recently had regionals for D.I. We hosted them here at Seycove but many of you are probably wondering what D.I. is. Also, this blog post is just for regionals, the provincials post will come in a month or so.
Explaining D.I.
D.I. is an international school tournament based in the United States. There are different categories and subjects, but all groups have to have 2-7 people. I’ll talk more about my challenge and my group later, but let me explain D.I. to you first. Below is the introductory video for D.I. To me it seems like a cheesy ad but it’s convinced people to join the tournament so it worked.
There are different challenges you can choose from, but all of them have one thing in common, they have to have a story based around what they made. During your performance, the Appraisers, keep track of what you’re doing to give you points afterwards. The Appraisers are almost like judges but at the end they tell you what you did well and celebrate that.
The different challenges for this year were:
Here’s the link for the Destination Imagination website.
Apart from this we also had to do the instant challenge. Instant challenges give the group something to build or act in a span of 5 minutes most of the time. They provide the team with materials like rubber bands or paper clips. They all mostly give you points for your creativity and teamwork and not what you had to build. Unfortunately for whoever is reading this, I’m not allowed to tell you what we do. That’s good for me because I get to write less. Below is the video for it.
My group’s challenge
My team was put into Unlikely Attraction. We were four and I think we had great teamwork. Our team consisted of Fraser, Kyle, Jason, and me. Our challenge was to make an attraction like something you’d find at an amusement park and put it into an unlikely location. After that we had to make a story about our attraction and how it impacts its surroundings. Our team name was the Space Cows.
Below are the links for my team members’ posts.
We originally planned to make a bull ride that we could actually get onto. The fact that we wanted it to be rideable, changed our plans especially because we would need an enormous spring like the ones at playgrounds. Every team in our challenge had a 150$US budget. To buy a spring like the one we wanted, would alone go over-budget. We had to settle with a spaceship that looks like we merged the Millenium Falcon and a rocking chair.
Below are our original plans and drawings for what we were going to make.
This is what our ride looked like during the construction of it.
This is what our ride ended up like.
Our story was probably one of our best parts. We rehearsed so many times as I all other teams did. It’s about two explorers (me and Jason) going to Mars’ moon, Phobos, and discovering an abandoned festival/amusement park.
Below is the video for our performance, it was uploaded to YouTube by Fraser.
Our script was done and shared on Google Docs. Jason mostly wrote it but Kyle, Fraser, and I would contribute ideas and change things to be easier for us to memorize.
