The DI regionals have come to an end for PLP and now it is time for me to reorganize and prepare for the upcoming provincials. But before I do that it’s important to reflect on my journey so far in this project and what things need improving. I think you guys should also know what my groups challenge was. We had to have and invention that solves a problem, and when that problem is solved we needed impact scenery to show the impact of solving it. We also need two team choice elements and a story with a middle beginning and end. Of course we have the technical challenge so our invention has to use one technical method and our impact scenery has to use three. My group has decided that we would solve the problem of energy waste by creating an invention to close a fridge door, this along with impact scenery and a creative story was our approach to the challenge. With that said let me begin.

The process my group generally used in preparing for regionals was brainstorming, deciding on and idea and then breaking of to conquer parts individually. This strategy worked pretty well as it allowed us to quickly test and execute on new plans, as well as allowing each other with responsibility over what we were doing. Some down falls to this strategy was that it meant we weren’t building off each others combined skills as much as we could be. Luckily in the end we had around two people working on one part of the solution we came up with who I had allowed us to build off each other. Everyone in our group including myself were always giving feedback on designs and helping each other out as well. We used basecamp a lot in this project which was a really great tool. It helped us stay connected and on the same page and also keep the work we had done organized. I think the best example of our process to get to a solution was when we planned out our story. We had a brainstorming session to plan out the general idea, then we selected Ryan to write it. By using basecamp it was easy to se what he was writing give feedback and make changes quickly.

My groups campfire chat in Basecamp.

We had to do various types of research for this project as well. I researched ideas regarding the impact scenery to give myself inspiration for the design. Mathew and Finn also did a lot of research on the invention. It turned out to be very difficult programming the Arduino to spin and open our fridge door so Mathew and Finn were researching then testing then researching then testing. 

Our process and researching allowed us to eventually find a solution for the problem we had been given. We had two team choice elements, a backdrop, impact scenery, a story and an invention that all came together as our solution. 

Here are some pictures of these things so you can see them and understand their purpose.

Here’s our script.

Our invention circuit diagram.

Impact scenery diagram.

To make our solution successful we had to have two team-choice Elements that reflected our groups skills, impact scenery that used three technical methods to show the result of solving our problem, a story with a beginning, middle and end, and an invention that solved the problem. We had all these criteria met but some things ended up going wrong. Our impact scenery ended up only having one technical method and worst of all our invention failed to work. 

This brings me to my next section which is what we want to (and need to) improve on in our next presentation. The first thing is obviously the invention. The invention was the key part of our presentation and it not working could not happen again. We needed to make it easy to activate and more importantly much more consistent. As for the impact scenery the main problem was that it was hard to operate all three technical methods at once (light, sound and mechanical). Fixing this would be hard but I had a plan on how to redesign it. We also wanted to practise more as some parts of the story had been unclear and we made mistakes. 

Overall although regionals was by no means amazing it was clearly something that we could learn from our mistakes and rejoice in the things that went well. I wasn’t actually there for the presentation because of the ski team provincials but my group managed to take first place. Now its time for me to start improving, thanks for reading and stay tuned for more posts to come.