Destination Imagination… It’s back and it’s coming stronger than ever. For those who don’t know what Destination Imagination is, or DI for short, check out these blog posts from lasts year’s DI and what it actually is.
What’s DI?
How we did last year:
And for those who didn’t check out the blog posts and still don’t know what DI is, it’s essentially a competition amongst elementary kids all the way to high school kids which has several different categories to compete in. Some of them this year were the Engineering Challenge, the Technical Challenge, the Fine Arts Challenge, etc. In each category, there’ll be a plethora of competing groups which will be looking to qualify from regionals to provincials, then to globals where the winning group from each category will then receive a pretty awesome prize. In each category, there will be a challenge that has to be accomplished and then have a skit that revolves around the challenge. The group will rehearse and perform their skit along with their challenge to a group of judges who will score each individual aspect of the performance/challenge, along with two team choice elements. There’s a ton of rules for each category and there are many quotas the finished product will have to meet.
For example, this year, I was in the secondary level for the Engineering Challenge with Sam, Adam, Spencer, and Michael. Our challenge was to build several free standing structures made only of balsa wood and glue that would support a certain amount of weight. The more weight it holds, the more points the group gets. The structures have to have a combined weight of under 25 grams and has to be in the range of 7.5-9 inches in height. The skit had to deal with an international issue and how different nations come together to solve it. 
We immediately built our freestanding structures to get it out of the way and focus on our skit. We started by brainstorming ideas and we finally came up with the idea for our skit.
Here is our google doc filled with the different forms we filled, ideas, and the finished script…
We knew that coming up with a story in the future would be better for us as we wouldn’t be confined to historical events as we can make up our own in the future. Saying that, we made our international issue about how global warming is making Earth uninhabitable and that humanity’s only hope for survival is to find a new planet to live on. The story starts with government officials from the USA, Canada, UK, and Italy in a room arguing about how they’re going to spend their money money the ships that will leave Earth. Italy and the UK argue that building several cheaper ships is less risky than building one large, high quality ship that Canada and the US argue is a better solution. Eventually, Italy and the UK leave and the US and Canada join together to build one large ship. The scene then goes to a construction yard where two construction workers are talking about the progress of the ship and what they’re going to do with it. One of the construction workers notice the structures we made of balsa wood and asks what it is. The other worker explains that it’s a scaled down version of the ship and that the weights on top represent the pressure that the ship will experience in space. We then tested the structure which ended up breaking as soon as we put weight on it. We were ready for that in our script though and recovered quite gracefully I must say by saying it was meant to break and that the weight put on the ship is 2.5 times more pressure than what it will experience in space. The scene then moves onto the astronauts aboard the ship getting ready to launch and then finally launching into space. Sam had even made an animation of the takeoff and the exploration of space, which also served as our background. The ship experiences a minor problem and is directed to the Canadarm to be repaired, it is then redirected for the new planet they are about to explore. The scene cuts to four years later when the ship finally arrive at the planet “Gargantuan” and lands safely. That’s where the skit was supposed to finish but unfortunately, we just ran out of time and couldn’t finish.
After all that, we placed 5th out of… 5 teams, but we still qualified for provincials, so we’re just starting to get ready on how we can improve our performance and structures to quality for globals. Until then, this is all we have, thanks for reading!
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