Hi and welcome back to a blog post, guess what this is going to be about, you probably already know because of the title of the blog but it’s about di so you are only going to get one of these per year now let’s get into it.

what is di

di is a National competition for kids of almost all grades where they are in teams and get to choose a challenge to work on. In the challenge, they have to solve the problem given to them using the required methods from the challenge they chose. Some of the challenges are technical, scientific, improv, and fine arts. Then they present them to adult appraisers and an audience that later in the competition can be almost a thousand people or more after their performance then they have to do a insist challenge that they have no time to prepare for. And they need 2 team choice elements that represent their team. they also can get no help from people outside the team so not even the teachers or else it could be counted as interference and get them disqualified. Also, the competition is at the start of April

DI for me

Ok now that’s more clear I can talk about it better
so we started this project near the start of winter break so December if you don’t know when that is somehow. It seemed strange that we started it in December when we started it but I think that it was a good time to start it now that I look back. My challenge was the technical we had to make 2 technical devices that means things that use robotics, mechanical aspects chemicals, mathematics and more we also had to have 3 hazards that our devices had to overcome in a story that we had to make about escaping a hazardous situation. So when we started it our first priority was to sort and choose ideas for everything and work on our teamwork because we were put in random teams by the teachers. So once we thought we had all our ideas we researched them over winter break but when we had to work over winter break my team was super confused and researched things we were not even going to use because we made too many ideas. But we di ceded that we would roughly have a story about people trying to steal a secret pizza recipe from an abanded pizza restaurant with a remote-controlled car and an undecided for a long time other object in the restaurant the need to overcome a tunnel moveable object and uneven terrain. Then after lots of procrastinating and scriptwriting which I proudly wrote a lot more than I meant to when I wrote some of it. But then it was a month and a half and we had most of our car and the other device was a bit unclear we thought an extendable hand would work when I thought about it I don’t think it would work so I suggested that a pullback car would work better for everything so we switched to that then we decided to meet every Wednesday to work on what we needed to do dress rehearsals our teachers set up where we practiced and showed them what we have done. Then we had a month left with everything made but not painted, besides the pullback car which had not been worked on because we wanted to 3d print the spring but the 3d printer had trouble printing it. Then after a few weeks where we came early almost every day and stayed late after school, we had everything done besides the pullback car we even had our team choice elements which were wood burnt signs and spooky sounds. For our performance, I was a ghost because I can kinda sound old which I thought was cool but also I was kinda the villain of the story. We tried a few run-throughs on our own and it went maybe not so great but ok because we at least got to practice and real more confident.
then the presentation.
we all got there on time and did a few run-throughs without the script in front of us and it went well so we felt pretty good when we were called in at 1:00 we felt good about ourselves and we did a good job improvising anything that was messed up during the performance and during it, we barely messed up then it was over or at least the performance was then we did the instant challenge which I thought would go well because we normally do good at them but we messed up the time for it so it wasn’t to clean overall then on April 11 we saw the score and we got 4 for the provincial tournament which I was happy about. That’s about it so thanks for reading bye

-dylan