The Destination Imagination regionals tournament was a hectic one for sure, it was my first time competing in this tournament but I’m not yet convinced that I would do this in my free time. We worked in a group of 5 with me, Ryder, Julien, Liam and Nathan to compete in a scientific challenge “The First Encounter”. Our team worked for about a month and a bit to create a solution for our challenge. Now let me take you through our journey to regionals.

Destination Imagination Regionals Video

It started off with our idea of proboscis monkeys, we wanted to incorporate these into our solution somehow. The next idea was was to have our local habitat the British Columbia rainforest incorporated into the solution because our theory about this was that because everyone live here that they would better understand the solution. Our story ended up being a zoo escape and proboscis monkeys tearing up the forest and growing claws as the morph.  They the would attack one of the local animals, the black bear. When we finished laying down the framework we started on building. Our first idea for materials was cardboard, and lots of it. This would start off the first major props for our solution which were the trees for the rainforest. Our idea was to fold some cardboard boxes into long tall rectangles and glue green paper on the top. To show the falling of the trees we decided to make a hydraulic arm. Julien was in charge for this but we all worked on it as a team to complete it faster and more efficiently. One of our team choice elements was music so you can listen to that below.

On our expedition trying to find more materials to use we came across two big wooden triangles. We kept the triangles for a bit then we eventually found a use for them. Our idea was to build a bush out of these to go with our theme. We nailed two planks onto the triangle so it was freestanding. We also made the bush super wide and that gave us a lot of room inside of it. So instead of that space going to waste we used it for the black bear to go in then pop out and also for the monkeys to morph. Just when we thought we were done we came across a roadblock, the bush couldn’t fit through a door. I’m sure it was inevitable for something like this to happen given the fact that we never measured anything and never even thought about taking it through a door for that matter. So we had to tear it down and rebuild it, this was a moderate setback for our team so we had to work extra hard to get the rest of the things done.

For the next tournament I think that we need to work on our story the most, we should add more clarity throughout our performance and a story that lasts longer. This should be our number one priority so the time that we have will be spent more on the story.