Destination Imagination!
After months of working on our pinball machine my team (Griffin, Milaina, Oliver, Cece and Maggie) finally were ready (not really😬) for the DI Regionals Tournament! I bet you’re wondering what Destination Imagination actually IS, well Destination Imagination or DI where schools or just people at home compete in different challenges to win. I was part of the technical team and our challenge was to make a pinball machine! Our pinball machine was 16 feet long and controlled by my teammate Oliver. Our team name is called “The Oversleepers” and we came 3rd! We have qualified for the regionals tournament which we will be showing our pinball machine again, but we will be able to make whatever changes we want to our pinball machine and script. I have done DI before when I was in grade 4 and we won! We won the instant challenge and the actual challenge and so I had some experience going into the competition.
Our Challenge
Our challenge was to make a life size pinball machine that a size 3 soccer ball can go through. We were given a 16 feet by 8 feet playing field for our pinball machine to be displayed in. We had to create a story to go with it and ours was based off Alice in Wonderland.
Preparation
Prior to the competition we worked very hard for several weeks creating and building the pinball machine. We worked very hard and built things in Cece’s dad’s workshop and at school. We all decided what characters we were going to be, I was the Queen of Hearts, Oliver was Tweedle Dum, Griffin was Tweedle Dee, Milaina was The Mad Hatter, and Cece was Alice. We worked hard creating and rehearsing our script until we had it memorized fully.
The Competition
On the day of the tournament we had to be at school at 8:30. Our presentation was the first one out all the groups not just ours so it was very nerve wracking being the first group to go! It was pretty good we just need to get more materials to make it better. The presentation had to be 8 minutes and in that time we had to set up our pinball machine and present our whole script.
The Forms
Like anything in life we had to fill out a bunch of forms that asked questions about our machine and what we would be showing. Since we were in the technical challenge we had the most forms to fill out (actually engineering had the same amount🤭.) I was in charge of writing all the main information down, but there were also other forms like the expense report and more. There were 3 pages in the main forms but each one had many questions to fill out.
Rose🌹, Bud🌷, and Thorns🥀
ROSE= Things we did well on
I think that my group did a really good job at communicating and working together. We also did really well on going first because it’s not easy because we had to set the bar and that was really scary! Our team did a good job not giving up even when a round of our pinball machine didn’t work we kept going and didn’t let it crush our courage.
BUD= Things we can improve on
Somethings we can improve on is getting together to work on our pinball machine more often. Everyone is very busy all the time but I feel that we need to skip somethings so we can get together more often and I think that could of made our pinball machine better.
THORN= Things we didn’t do well and things we can do better
I think we can defiantly do better at making our pinball machine out of wood and not just making half of it out of cardboard. Cardboard is very flimsy so it didn’t really work for our pinball machine so we defiantly need to make it out of wood next time.
I hope we can learn from our mistakes and do better next time but I am proud of what we did do well and we need to bring that confidence to the next competition!
The instant Challenge
I can’t actually say anything about the Instant challenge until June because it is top secret!🤫 When this is all over in June I will be able to share so make sure you’re checking my blog for my next post about our DI update!
Conclusion
I have learned so much from DI and I am very happy at what we have achieved and I hope that we will do even better in the provincials and I hope that I can continue working with my group over spring break so we can make our pinball machine even better than before! Even though the first competition was very stressful I really enjoyed it and I am really excited for provincials and I hope that we can do our best! 😁
