“The world is a canvas for your imagination. You are the painter. There are NO RULES. Get to work!”
Fearless soul
For ages humans have used their imaginations to innovate and create. This drive to create new ideas and understand the world better has allowed the human race to expand beyond what we every thought would be possible. Whether that expansion was good to all cultures is still up for debate but regardless this rapid expansion has lead to ravish life that we live today. Destination Imagination cultivates that inert drive to be creative in an ‘interesting’ way to say the least.
The Challenge
“Boom! This Challenge is all about the crash! Your team will design and build a Structure from a specified set of materials that can withstand impacts from dropped weights while being as light as possible.”
Destination Imagination Engineering Challenge
This learning outcome requires us to build a structure to withstand 120 pounds of dropped weight. It has to be made out of wood, glue, fishing wire (limitations), and cork. You also had to include the structure in some way to your story.
“Your team will tell a story about a sudden event that has dramatic impact. What will happen? Who will it affect? The choice is yours and yours alone!”
Destination Imagination Engineering Challenge
The story had to be creative and fun to watch, we tried to include elements of humour and plot twists to make sure the viewer is always engaged
“To give your sudden event even more of a BANG, your team will use Technical Methods to design and create an Event Depicter that will visibly or audibly enhance the dramatic impact of your story.”
Destination Imagination Engineering Challenge
The technical methods had to be shown in the construction of our event depictor. When creating this we had to make sure that the audience would be able to see what the event it was depicting
“Your team will showcase your collective interests, skills, strengths and talents as a team and as individuals by creating and presenting two Team Choice Elements.”
Destination Imagination Engineering Challenge
We explored our talents and interests and researched in ways to incorporate it into our presentation.
From the very beginning we had a very good story outline, however along the way we had no shortage of bumps and obstacles. From the second day our group met we came up with idea with basis around scientist testing his creations.
From there we explored different ideas but none really had the same vibe as our first one. So by the the turn of the year we were quite clear on what idea we would run with. As we continued to develop the details of our story we were faced with a major problem. Our story was great in its simple yet interesting character development but lacked in actual engineering content. This problem could patched up by including some seismology during the monologues the scientist.
We could also make sure to emphasise the research we had done on earthquakes during the presentation. It seemed like a perfect fit that we could add earthquake information to our backdrop to help improve educational content not at the expense of story quality. By now the basic outline of our story consisted of a scientist that created 3 living creatures to test natural disasters on. These natural disasters would be caused by weight dropping on the structure throughout our presentation. By the last weight dropped the sudden event will occur. A large earthquake will occur and it will trigger a response in the even depector that we made that represents a seismograph. We created a tentative script and as we made adjustments to the story and both engineering prompts the script adjusted with it. Soom we had a story that was both interesting and showed the research and learning we did over the whole DI process. It was now down to memorizing my lines for the competition.
Our other major story element involved the creation of backdrop that was stunning and had a meaningful impact to the story as a whole. Luca had the resources and knowledge on how to work with film quality backdrops started us on the right foot. Like most parts to DI it wasn’t just what it was cut out to be however. Needing go over the canvas structure 5 times took a very long time and had we not noticed the problem we would have had a even larger problem on our hands. Once completed the backdrop was one of the greatest points of our project. In the end it is a huge part of our story.
Building the structure was a tedious yet interesting part of the challenge. When some turn away and hope for the best as a group we put an importance on research and development of our structure. This focus on research helped us build a structure that is much stronger than anyone’s else’s in the tournament. One of the major things we studied was usage of tresses and how they could be used in tandem with support beams to help distribute weight better. We began to think about ways we incorporate our studies when it dawned on us that we needed to use a wide base that was able to spread weight over a large area while using tresses and support beams to help regulate the flow of weight down through the structure. This plan required extreme precision and our group was up to the challenge when we came up with a sort of combination between japanese joinery and wood glue. It required a large amount of focus and fine building. In the end it was quite clear that this process added many days onto the building process but by evidence of the amount of weight the structure held (120 lbs dropped) and the fact that it probably could have held a large amount more than the maximum held. However the structure may be the core part of the challenge but there is still so much we had to accomplish.
INSERT PHOTOS OF FINAL STRUCTURE
The final leg of our DI experience was creating the so called event depictor. As I spoke of up above our event depictor would be a seismograph that displays the impact and severity of an earthquake. This idea seemed promising from the beginning but proved very difficult when it came down to actual generation of ideas. After many days of thinking of what we could do to make it remote controllable yet big enough for the audience to see. When time was almost short robin came up with a truly ingenious idea. He mentioned the idea of using a vibrating motor that move a string which would in turn move a pen on paper. We could rig the motor to start whenever I sent an infrared lightwave into a detector. This idea would prove successful with only minor adjustments made.
The Competition & Looking Forward
It’s gameday!! It’s time to show what we have accomplished to the world. Whether it be nervousness or uneasiness our whole group needed to perform well if we are to execute what we want to accomplish. As we followed up on all the practice over the past week on the day we were feeling quite confident in our team solution and our story. As long as we can perform…
Overall our performance is good, a few minor flaws and missed cues but overall we covered all the points we needed to. However, the appraisers believed that our presentation covered well more than what was required and gave use nearly perfect marks for all things about story and team choice elements.
Looking at the scores an area for improvement is team choice element 2 and touching up our story. These are some things we as a group plan to do before spring break so that we can just get right down to business and practice and be ready for provincials right after spring break. We layed out a plan for our team moving forward with deadlines and clear indications with who is doing what.
In the end looking forward is a tall task but me must continue to push our challenge to the limits to ensure our success…
UNTIL NEXT TIME…
