Who knows what Destination Imagination is?

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Hi guys, I’m back again and today I am going to be talking about something amazing called Destination Imagination, DI for short. DI is basically WEday for students. It’s a event where people gather from all over and show off their knowledge by performing a solution to a specific challenge. The challenge is given out before the days of presenting so the faster you learn what the challenges are, the sooner you can start working on them. Every year there are around 5 “team challenges” which are challenges given with a required criteria but enough space for creativity, that you can personalize. And differentiate your solution from others. The 7 team challenges fall under the following categories; scientific, engineering, improv, fine arts, and technical which I was in.

The technical challenge this year was to build an aircraft that could fly and drop 5 payloads. This would be presented by a story that we made about exploring an unknown place, and bringing out a featured character. If that wasn’t enough, we were also tasked with including 2 team choice elements which were used to show off our own individual talents and passions. There were 6 people in my group: Ally, Anders, Anthony, Brenton, Ryan, and me (link names). There are 3 different tournaments in DI. The first one, Regionals, is the only one that we have competed in so fa. The next level is the provincial tournament, and finally the globals. Today I will talk about how my group came up with a solution, how we worked together, and what I would have wanted to do differently if I were to do this again.

Our first challenge that we presented was the team challenge, this went slightly better than the dress rehearsal before the performance, which in my opinion, still wasn’t that great. There were a lot of things that didn’t turn out as we wanted however, I would definitely say that we did a pretty good job considering our circumstances. The audience did laugh along to some of the jokes we made and everyone seemed to enjoy the overall performance that we put up.

The aircraft

So the type of aircraft that my group (Mechanica) originally planned to build was a quadcopter drone. This was what we stuck with until about a week before the Regional tournament. At that point my group realized that we didn’t have all of the materials to build a drone, and that we shouldn’t rely on them coming. As such, Anders took charge and decided that I’d we were going to have a product to compete with we needed a different approach then the one we took. So, we changed from building a drone to building a blimp. We got together and decided that if we were going to turn in a final product we needed to get our act together.

The people who were more interested in technical aspects took over. We used helium balloons to lift our aircraft and got motor attached to a receiver and connector that could be controlled by a remote. This made it so that all we had to do was attach the motors and receiver to the helium balloons so that we had a flying aircraft. The next challenge was making sure that the aircraft was still maneuverable and could be controlled with ease. This was important for the payload drops. If it wast easy to maneuver, then we would lose point for not getting the payloads to drop where we wanted them to.

The payload

Next we had the payload. This wasn’t something that I personally worked on although I did have a suggestion of one way to drop the payloads.

It wasn’t a completed idea and there were many holes in the plane so it was dropped quickly. Instead we used electro magnets. In simple terms this is were there are 2 magnets that connect to each other, and when we punch a button, they basically stop being magnetic. To do this we had tin bowls as are drop and attached coins that were magnetic to them. The we had our divine that used electricity to connect to the magnetic. When we stopped the electric flow, we also stopped the magnets ability to connect to each other. The problems that we had with this was that whenever we did a demonstration it would fail, for multiple reasons. One of the main ones was the fact that the battery was never charged. This meant that we didn’t have any electricity to begin with so it was difficult to start it. The second reason was that the wires didn’t connect. This was the problem we had the day of he regional tournament. The wires kept disconnecting and we had to keep trying to solder them. In the end it didn’t work and we presented our story without our payload. This meant that we hadn’t completed the challenge and we lost a lot of points because of it. We did however talk to the appraisers and told them what was supposed to happen, how we achieved that and what went wrong with what we did, and finally what we could do next time to fix our mistake.

 

The story

Our story was one of the better aspects of our solution. The story was the typical crash landing on a planet and we ran out of food. In order to find food, we sent people (including me) out to explore the recharge of our ship to see if we could find a battery for our radio. If we could fix our radio then we could contact earth and get supply drop. However, on our way to the recharge there was a lot of bad weather and we took shelter in this cave. In this cave there are these strange crystals. One of the people there touches the crystal and collapses. The remaining one, realizing the crystal contains energy, grabs it and runs back to the camp. The remaining explorers shave down the crystal and fix the radio. They contact earth and get supply drops. At this point we had to improvise because we didn’t have our payload drop. So we sent our aircraft but since nothing dropped we were left to starve. During the time that the aircraft took to get to the planet where we were stranded, we managed to revive the guy who fainted.

Our story and performance itself could have been better but we added some jokes and the audience laughed at them so I felt pretty proud. I was the featured character and was the only female actor in our little skit. I was also the person in charge of making the backdrop and most of the props, though I got help, and I would defiantly say that the turned out pretty good. It took a lot of work to make some of the props and backdrops, and some of them we didn’t end up using but I still had a lot of fun making them.

 

Team choice elements

The team choice elements that we did could have been better. The first one that we did was the music. One member in our group could play the trumpet so i recorded him play and fixed it so that it replayed itself. I also used a little auto tune. The song that he played was called space Odyssey. I had actually created an original song for this team choice element, but even I didn’t like the way that it sounded so we went with the recorded version.

This is the version that I recorded my group member doing, of space odyssey:

And this is the song that I created but I don’t really like, i accidentally deleted.

The second team choice element was originally a chemical reaction of earthier elephant toothpaste or vinegar and backing soda. We had a cool contraption that was a box that fell away when we pulled a lever. We were going to use it when our team member went near the crystal so that it was his cue to faint.

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This wasn’t what we did though. This is something that I really regret because we had the whole thing ready to work and got everything together for the regional tournament. However, on the day of the tournament, the rest of the group had apparently decided that we weren’t going to use it. Instead we got a backdrop that was made using spray paint. This got us a lot less points then we could have and i thought that it was very unoriginal, even though every team needed a backdrop. It did however look very cool and I appreciated the fact that it was made.

   

Concluding things

Before I finish thing off i would just like to state the fact that our teams ability to communicate and work together was absolutely horrible. I think that if we spent more time trying to get along then we might have done better overall in creating a solution and dividing up the work. I found it really annoying when our group members started to blame each other for things that went wrong even when it wasn’t there fault, and even if it was they could have been more supportive of what they had actually done instead of looking at what they hadn’t. Some people started rumours about other team members and some group members directly told people to their face that they sucked and were being quite rude and blatant when in reality it was they themselves that scrapped all of this team members work. We did however manage to pull it together in the last few hours before our performance.

Here’s the final product:

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Highlights: