Hello everyone!

Welcome to yet another blog post, for this this one our focus is our time working on and preforming in destination imagination (D.I.) 2025, It actually was a really good experience this year and I’m exited to share my journey throughout D.I. this year.

We began working on our challenge what in my opinion was far to late into the year, with only a little over a month into the first contest, but hey, that’s just the way things happened this year. I was very happy with my group this year, I had a strong team of dedicated people who wanted to do really well this year, so I was pretty confidence going into our design process. We then created a group messages chat to collaborate on which ended up working very well.

We were assigned to the engineering challenge, which only two of us were interested in, for the others it was their last choice (but they still did a great job). We started by deciding on a general team conduct to follow and then moved to identifying everyone’s personal strengths. We quickly realized it would be best to split into an engineering team and a story & props team; I was on the engineering team.

A test course we made to see if our transporter worked

I don’t want to reveal to much about our solution the the challenge yet (which was to bring weights across a cord on some sort of transporter), because I have been told not too, as there are still some regional tournaments going on, one we need to make sure no one uses our ideas. We had a good design process though and went though many rounds of ideation and iteration before we landed on something that we were happy with as an end product. It’s certainly not perfect and it did break a little later on but we have thought of some ways to improve it for the provincial tournament in a month-or-so’s time.

Some basic ideation sketches that we may or may not have used.

While we worked on that our story team was hard at work creating a parody of the greatest showman for us to preform. They did a great job with the story, script and props and I think the D.I. appraisers were very impressed. I’ve learnt a lot about what good team collaboration, collaboration, and communication looks like, and I’m really thankful to my team for that. I also devolved my brainstorming process and learned a little bit about mechanical engineering principles in order to build our transporter.

On the day of the tournament, our team agreed to meet early to get in a whole bunch of extra script run-throughs and practice performances. It was exhausting doing ~8 run-throughs in a row, but it all paid off after we had a really good performance. We then had our instant improv challenge which went well as our grouped worked well together towards a solution. After all that, our hard work was rewarded with winning our category, which felt awesome, even though I was rather confident we would win.

Our team after finishing our performance. I’m the one on the far left looking flustered, as I had just been running around trying to make sure everything was in the right place so we could finish our performance on time.

For the provincial tournament, we did some brainstorming and made a list of things to fix/change that we are beginning to implement now, but I still don’t want to say what it is so we don’t break the rules. Hope you guys found this interesting, and look for the part two in a month or so!