As a big project for Maker, we participated in an event called DI (Destination Imagination). DI is an annual event in which students from all different school ages try to complete challenges from one of 5 categories (technical, engineering, science, fine arts and improv). I was put in the technical group with five other people: Anthony, Meg, Ally, Ryan and Brenton.The technical challenge was really hard because we had to design and build an aircraft. This aircraft had to fly five times and needed a payload that was able to do five payload drops and flights. We had to have two team choice elements within our challenge which are items that are unique just to your group. Our story had to be connected to our aircraft and payload. I have learnt a lot throughout doing my challenge and I am excited to do it for next year.

In the beginning, we had to understand and recognize what the challenge required. We were given an online booklet which we put into Notability and highlighted the important parts and the specific rules to get the most points possible. This helped me realize what we were working towards and made me begin thinking of ideas for the challenge. Then as a group we had to fill out 16 ideas in different boxes so the final product was lots of individual boxes on a table. We organized the idea boxes into the different deliverables. I thought all of the ideas were interesting, but my group and I were being really ambitious and we wanted to do something way above our capability at that moment. However, we decided to make a Quadcopter drone, so I instantly started researching all of the parts.

All our ideas payed out in different categories.

I researched all the parts needed from the ESCs to videos on soldering and how everything worked in a drone. I spent many hours finding parts that would work together to build the drone. However, as the tournament date came closer our options of what would be available in time began to slim and I had to buy certain parts even if they didn’t have the best of reviews. I received most of parts needed but we were still short a couple of parts with only 2 days left before the tournament, so we were going to have to try something new. Luckily while looking through my closet I found an old helium blimp which gave me inspiration to make one of my own. I was disappointed that we couldn’t do the drone as I put in so much time and effort, but the blimp was a good quick idea. Now with a concrete plan and a day left until the presentation I bought a RC helicopter from Canadian Tire for $32. I gutted and attached the parts to a stick and added a cardboard model of a spaceship. I bought helium balloons and a tank to try out at school. We added helium balloons and it WORKED…or so we thought. One of the wires detached and I when we tried to solder it back it wouldn’t work. We kept trying for a long time until I started freaking out. I was so worried but I decided to ask my mom to bring my old helicopter to one of my group member’s house. I finally figured out how to charge the old helicopter and so we dissembled the helicopter again and attached it to a lighter stick. We used the same model and attached it to balloons. I turned on the controller and then I turned on the blimp… and then it flew. I was overjoyed with excitement.

Drone design that I made that we were originally going to do.

Our final product

When we were brainstorming for possible options for the team choice elements. I came up the idea to have music that we played with my trumpet and Meg’s clarinet playing while the payloads were being dropped. We recorded the music using GarageBand and we played the music from my portable Bluetooth speaker. I learnt how to play space odyssey which is a really easy but cool song to play. I also came up with the idea for the second team choice element. In elementary school, I made a spray paint art piece for a project so for our backdrop I decided to scale up the project and make a huge spray painting. I first made these cardboard circles for the next part of the backdrop. I got a big piece of white paper from our school and laid it outside on a few pieces cardboard as the ground was wet. I want to explain what I learnt instead of what I did so this video I have embedded shows all the steps I did for making the art. I added a few more moons than the instructional video because I thought it would look cool. I relearnt how to make something with spray paint and all of the techniques required. I learnt how to problem solve as I didn’t have all of the proper equipment and tools for the backdrop. I had lots of fun doing the art and it has inspired me to do spray painting more often.

When it came time to have our final aircraft carry the payload, it was way too heavy for the balloons to carry and the payload mechanism broke at the last minute so we couldn’t have used it in our presentation. On the day of the regional presentation we walked out into the gym carrying our backdrops. I was really worried what was going to happen in our presentation, but I just thought that it was going to go well. Our time started and we started to set up which took barely any time. Ryan started his narration and the story had officially started. I thought I did a pretty good job presenting my lines however, we missed some lines because of an early entry. Everything was going great but then when it came to the flying part, everything fell apart. The batteries in the controller fell out so we quickly had to put them back in but that cost us lots of time. Luckily Ryan was able to improvise to keep our story from falling apart. 

During the presentation, we luckily got 3 landings which resulted in us getting the most points in the aircraft section. We only received 14 points for the payload because we didn’t have a payload that worked. We were given 30/60 points for our story, but this is something we are trying to improve to get as many points as possible next time. We didn’t do the best on our team choice elements because the spray-painted backdrop was not explained. We have lots of things to keep working on, but we came third and I thought we did really well.

For the upcoming provincial DI tournament, there are some things that we are working towards. We can make the payload better by making it lighter so that our aircraft can carry it. We also need to make sure that the payload battery is charged and doesn’t fail at the last minute. Something that our group decided that we could work on, was explaining the process of the team choice element and possibly adding to it to make it better. We can also work on the gap in our story where we are doing nothing. To fix this we can improve the speed of the aircraft drops, write the script to add more jokes, have the payload drops at different times in the story or add special effects. Overall, I am really happy that we were able to get something flying that was able to steer with less than 24 hours before the presentation.