Well, we since we’ve done it for the past two years, we might as well do it again and make it three in a row.

Yes, I’m talking about DI. Or Destination Imagination, if you must. If you want to you can click here to read my other DI posts. But read this one since I spent a lot of time writing it…

This year, for the first time we were actually competing against other teams from Seycove, the grade 9 PLP class, since we are both in the senior level. As usual in DI, there are the same challenge topics, but not the same actual challenges. This year, I was put into the Technical Challenge: Maze Craze.  Click here to see what all the other challenges were.

This short video explains how our challenge works:

 

So, yeah. We had a lot to do.

We were given our challenge and groups back in the late fall, sometime before christmas. My group consisted of me, Spencer, Izzy, Kate, Isobel and Calum. I was quite happy with our group.

First off, we started brainstorming ideas. This was in the form of writing them down on small idea tiles, and then arranging them as a group based on their topic. Those topics could be things that were ideas for the story, the Maze Traveler, or our Team Choice Elements. We worked out a lot of different ideas, and arranged them all to look like below:

Oh yeah, I mentioned Team Choice elements earlier, and they are something extra that we add to our performance to make it more personalized. Here is more information about them:

These team choice elements would be 15% of our overall score, and so we needed them to be good quality. But for some reason, every year in our groups, we never really go above and beyond with these TCE. I dont know why. Anyways, back to the creative process.

The next step was deciding on a story, and then writing the script. We looked over our idea squares, and decided on a police type story. Then we needed to decide on what parts of the challenge needed to be in our story, and how we would incorporate them in to make it interesting. Here is an example of a chart we made about the maze traveler, in our planning stage:

We had one of these charts for every deliverable of our challenge. The maze traveler would be a bomb-seeking/defusing rover, and would be coded to each of the 8 random mazes we were given, so we would follow it through the maze. The aim was that we would get a lot of points for coding and building our own traveler, and not just buy an RC car from Wal-mart.

We then began working out the more visual parts of the presentation, like who is going to be who. We decided on the following characters:

• Spencer: An old man named Rob who is telling the story
• Sam: The young version of Rob when he was actually experiencing the story
• Calum: Rob’s police partner and childhood best friend, named Thomas
• Izzy: An Evil Villian
• Kate: A French Evil Villian
• Isobel: Police Captain

The Story:

The context for our story was a flashback. Spencer was the older version but also present day version of me, and he is at a family reunion 50 years after the story happened. In the story, he was a police officer on the bomb squad, and him and his partner Thomas were dispatch on  their first mission on their first day of the force, straight out of the academy. They were given their gear by the Police Captain, Isobel, and were sent off to an old apartment building. Rob and thomas then entered the building, which was the maze, and sent in the bomb rover. Rob and thomas followed it through the maze and past the two event squares.

Event Squares:

In the 16×16 foot maze, two of the 16 4×4 squares were set apart as event squares. The maze and the location of the event squares would differ based on the random maze we pick two minutes before the performance starts. This makes things a little difficult. But not to worry, it’s not too bad.

But on the event squares, two things had to happen.

On one event square, a object removal had to happen. The maze traveler had to remove some object from the maze, in any way shape or form.

And on the other event square, a prop transformation and to occur. This could be anything that could be seen from 25 feet away, and had to be an obvious change.

Our group could choose the order of the event squares for the performance. But, enough talk, back to…

The Story

The first Event Square was object removal, and Rob and Thomas got the rover to push a paper-mâché bomb out of the maze. Then they advanced through the maze until they came across the second event square. And then things happened. The prop transformation was on another paper mâché bomb, with a strip of LED lights taped all around it. The LED lights go off, and BOOOM goes a bomb.

But, instead of me telling you what happened next, watch the video of our actual performance here.

Results

Well, if I can say one thing, our performance didnt go as planned. I mean, for the most part it did but the maze traveler didnt even move. Unless we kicked it. Which is what we ended up having to do. This was our scoresheet. It tells you the maximum points for each topic of our performance, and then the amount of points we were actually given.

An aspect that the judges really liked was our backdrop. This wasn’t for points, but they said they really like how it was built. That’s because we built it to look like a large storybook. Me and spencer took a trip to Rona and bought two sheets of thin ish plywood, cut them in half, and then screwed them together with hinges to make an eight page book. This was because Spencer was telling a story, and it matched that theme perfectly.

An aspect of our performance that didn’t go so well were our team choice elements. We didn’t receive mush points for the music one because it was played extremely quietly, and our lets just say our french speaking character wasn’t exactly a big hit. We need to rethink those.

And also, our object transformation wasn’t executed properly and so we were scored pretty low on that as well. The lights were supposed to become red via a remote that changes the colours of the LED strip, but the remote broke before the performance…

Lets move on…

 

Reflection Time!

I think that even though our rover failed completely, and we didnt get that much points for… anything else… we did really well. We had to do some quick thinking while presenting since  our script required an actual working rover. We worked well as a team and go through our performance with our dignity still intact, for the most part. The actual time we spent working on the project was pretty smooth, and it was fun. Just like every year, we pretty much leave everything until the last week before the tournament, and end up getting really rushed. But I feel we really worked hard and it paid off. I really do think we have a great start to a really good performance, which we INTENTIONALLY didn’t do for regionals and saved for provincials…

I think that we need to definitely work on the rover, thats just a given. But I also think that we can think up some pretty awesome team choice elements if we put our minds to it, since we are a pretty talented group of people. We definitely have a lot more to work on. Overall, I think we did quite well and Im sort of looking forward to provincials since i think we can do extremely well with a bit more practice.

And if the rover works.

*cough, cough, CALUM, cough…*

That’s all folks,

See you