DI Regionals can suck. Luckily, this year it didn’t, and instead, it was full of feelings of worry and doubt, but then slightly less worry and doubt, and then finally pride and joy. But what made me feel that way this year, well, that’s what this post is going to be about.

To start off, what is DI? Destination Imagination is a global competition in which students all around the world compete. In PLP, we do this to help grow our creative minds, develop our problem-solving skills, and learn how to collaborate with others. In PLP, this happens because we get put into random groups and given a challenge to take on.

Unfortunately, I still have to be hush-hush about some things because we still have DI provincials coming up and have been advised to keep our mouths closed about some specific details that we’ve experienced. I’ll still try to do my best to say as much as I’m allowed without having any problems.

There are a ton of different challenges groups can take on, but this year, I was put in the fine arts challenge, which so far has been pretty fun. In my group, I have 3 grade 9s: Baz, Caelum, and Hazel, and 2 other grade 10s: Gwenyth and Frankie. For some context of what we get points for, here’s our scoring sheet.

Now, to really get started. For this project, unlike my DI experience in grade 8, I wanted to be less controlling and really just go with the flow and do my part as well as I can, and I think that’s exactly what I did.

Now, before going fully into the building process of the wings, I’ll summarize the story our group came up with. A daring adrenaline junkie wants to climb the Burj Khalifa with his crew to film a Red Bull ad but ends up falling off the building and landing in heaven, where they decide to film an ad. But then they meet Zeus, who wants them to leave. They disrespect him and then apologize, and he helps them get down. If you want to see the full video of our performance at regionals, click this link.

To make this post interesting, I want to talk about my responsibility: the kinetic art piece, which were Zeus’s wings that opened and closed (also because I have more photos of it than other things). The first stage of creation was getting a proof of concept so that I would know what I was about to do would work. To make the proof of concept, I found a schematic to follow and sized it down so that I could use an empty Cheerio box to create it. Here are the schematics I used to create the proof of concept and the real wings (to be clear im not putting feathers on it). Now, once the proof of concept was done, I got to do the fun part of cutting cardboard and putting it all together, and by the end of the day, here’s what it looked like. Obviously, you can tell there was a lot of work to do, like how I’d wear it and how to make them open and close. At first, I just put a string on the back of each wing I could pull, but the force was too much and didn’t work, so I put two on each, and then it worked, but it still was really uncomfortable because I was using coat hangers that dug into my collarbone. So, to fix that, I made some string loops that went around the wings that I could wear like a backpack, and finally, to make it look more Zeus-like, I painted them gold, and finally, here’s the finished version (for now) in all its glory.

Now that that’s over, I want to talk about my experience so far. So far, it’s been a mix of worry and joy because we almost had nothing by the time we had to present, but we got our stuff together and managed to pull through, and even the last few hours till presenting were full of stress, from learning our lines to making the Burj stand up, it was a pretty stressful time, but when we all got on stage, we managed to remember most of our lines and everything worked. We definitely need to stop showing our back to the audience and speak a bit louder, but other than that, we’re doing pretty good, and I’m happy with where we’re at right now.

Big shoutout to all my group members, please go check out all their blogs:
Gwenyth, thanks for pulling the team together and doing the forms and helping out with pretty much all parts of everything.
Frankie, thanks for keeping the atmosphere positive and the amazing idea to put the sign at the top of the tower.
Baz (couldn’t find link), thanks for really pulling through and making the tower and clouds look so good and function so well.
Caelum, thanks for doing all the tech work and keeping us in check online.
Hazel, thanks for the ideas and bringing all the stuff that we needed.

Thanks for reading. I hope you have a good day or evening.