DI-ing inside: Destination Imagination Regional Tournament

The past term we have been working on a tournament called DESTINATION IMAGINATION. Every second day we have met up with our teams and made our challenges complete.

My category was technical, and our challenge was called The Big Fix. We had to build an invention to solve a problem, or problems. Here is that challenge, if you want to read more about it: Technical The Big Fix. My team was: Annie, Quinn, Evelyn and Nate. We decided to build an alarm clock to solve the problem of people not getting up on time (especially people in high school). We decided that to help people get up more efficiently, we would make a puzzle alarm box, to get your brain working, and to wake you up more.

The process

There was a long process to end up at DI. First we had to come up with a team name, which took longer than we thought, but we ended up with Tie DI. We spent a long time choosing that name, probably longer than we should’ve taken. We used something called an idea generation chart, to choose things like what our skit was going to be, and props, and a lot of things like that. Here is the idea generation chart: Idea Generation Chart.

Our script was one of the things that went well. We followed the script through all of it and I think it really helped us. The storyline we made probably could’ve been clearer, but other than that it was really good.

Something we used for our process was a burn down chart. A burn down chart is a chart that you have, where everything on the chart is at 100%, then as you complete tasks on the chart , it goes down.

It took us the whole time, but we finished a all of props and scenery, and by the time DI swung around we were pretty much ready.

The research

We probably didn’t do as much research as we should’ve, but I think we did enough. Part of our research was reading the rules for DI, Rules_of_The_Road and highlighting some of the important ones.

The other part of our research was researching what kind of alarms there were to wake you up better, what kinds of technical elements we could include in our solution, and things like that.

How it went

When we arrived at our school on a Saturday in the morning, we were probably thinking, “we’re against grade 5’s and 6’s, we’ll be fine, we’re probably going to at least place.” We were wrong. Even though we were up against grade 5’s, they won. We didn’t place. But that’s okay because there is still provincials. I think that one of the biggest reasons we didn’t place was because our invention broke 30 seconds before we went on stage. We attempted to fix it on stage but it didn’t work. Our invention was supposed to make an alarm sound from a circuit inside, but something fell on the circuit and it snapped. We ended up playing an alarm from a phone to improv.

Even though we didn’t place (there are 3 places), we got 4th, which is close to placing. Our instant challenge went ok, but not good enough to get us a lot of points. Another thing that went wrong in our performance was our impact scenery. The impact scenery was a part of the challenge that was supposed to show the impact of the invention on the world. Ours was a city scape, but it was tilting and was really far off from centre, so it looked really wonky.

But on the bright side, we did follow our script, our storyline, and we did some good improv.

What we are going to do now

Now that regionals are done, we have some fixing to do. When we got our feedback from our teachers/team managers, we found some big problems that needed to be fixed. One of the things we have to fix will be our desks. If you’ve seen the video at the top, we used chairs as desks, apparently from the audience they didn’t really look like desks, so we are going to make desks. Another thing we are going to fix will be the impact scenery, because it was not centred, and it didn’t light up properly. We are also going to make our invention more technical than just a circuit and we’re going to make the backdrop stable.

Overall I think that our regionals experience was a bit of a disaster but I’m looking forward to see what we can do for provincials.

Thank you for reading my blog post on DI! Be sure to comment.