Destination Imagination Part 1
A big part of PLP is that every year we get to compete in a big competition. This competition is called destination imagination. The first one that you get to compete in is regionals. The next one is provincials. My team and I have not done the provincials yet, so I will make another blog post to cover that. Seycove is hosting DI this year, and so we didn’t have to drive anywhere, luckily. Within DI, there are 4 main challenges that the rest of my classmates, teammates, and I did.
1. Technical: In the Technical challenge, teams must try to create their own working pinball machine, that uses a soccer ball as a pinball. There are many different requirements that your team must meet, the main one being that you must use three different modules, which all will have their own technical element integrated within. They must also integrate this into their story.
2. Engineering: In the Engineering challenge, teams must create design a machine in order to launch a beanbag and calculate where it will land. They must also integrate this into their story.
3.Scientific: In the Scientific challenge, this year teams must create a puppet, and some sort of artifact, that will help them to create and present a story about a character, whose discovery of an artifact leads to some sort of new finding.
4. Fine Arts: In the Fine Arts challenge, the teams will be bringing a visual work of art to life and creating their very own piece of kinetic art. They will be creating and presenting a story, inspired by work of visual art, that includes both a static and dynamic character.
Technical Challenge
I got to do the technical challenge for DI. In someways, this is both the hardest and easiest challenge.it takes up the most physical space, as we have a near 16 foot long, pinball machine that is in many different parts to cart around with us, and there are many different unworldly pieces of wood, metal, and cardboard that we have to bring back-and-forth from school to home. On the other hand, this challenge includes a lot of technical design, and involves much more hands-on physical work, so if you are into that, you would probably love to take part in this challenge.
Team Choice Elements
No matter what challenge you might be in, your team must still have two team choice elements. A team choice element could be anything from a well designed prop to a handmade scarf. There are only a few restrictions on what your team choice element can or can’t be. Our team choice elements were a stuffed bunny, (the White Rabbit and its clock) and a cat. (Which was the Cheshire Cat)
My Group Members
Thankfully, I did not have to do all this alone. I had a group of amazing team members on my side, throughout this journey that was DI. Below, I will include links to all of their blogs.
Griffin’s blog:
https://www.blog44.ca/griffina/
Ella’s blog:
Cece’s blog:
Oliver’s blog:
https://www.blog44.ca/oliverf/
Maggie’s blog:
https://www.blog44.ca/maggiet/
I am so glad to have the opportunity to have worked on such a wonderful team. We all brought our own unique skills and abilities to the table, and were able to make something pretty darn awesome. Ella, Maggie, and Cece have all taken the lead on the story aspect of the competition, Griffin, Oliver and I have definitely done more of the building side of things. Unfortunately, Maggie was not able to make it to the performance as she is away traveling. I contributed to this project by helping build and give ideas for a few of the machine modules, and during the performance, I tried to help the pinball machine run smoothly. (To no avail.)
What Went Well (and What Went Not so Well)
Well, I can’t exactly say that my groups performance went very well. Don’t get me wrong, we try our best, but our pinball machine that we had to make… It didn’t exactly work. We may have also *cough* forgotten *cough* about a team choice element. Whoops.  On the other hand, we did our best to improvise and roll with it. In addition, our teamwork was great, and we got a ton of feedback once we were done on how to improve for next time. It turns out that our solution for our challenge broke a few rules about some technicalities involving the positioning of some different elements.
There is one more thing that I haven’t told you how it went. This was the instant challenge. Unfortunately, I’m not actually allowed to talk about the instant challenge. At all. Even if I so much as what it was about or, or how we did, my entire team and I would be immediately disqualified. This is because no one is supposed to know what the instant challenge will be until you do it. So, in order to keep all teams on equal footing, no one is allowed to talk about the instant challenge until months and months after the competition.
Improvements for Next Time
Well, I can’t tell you exactly what our team is going to improve upon for next time, I will say that we definitely have a lot to work on. One of the most important things we’re going to be doing is trying to make sure that our machine follows all the rules. This is important, because we really don’t want to have any points deducted from our scoring at the provincials.
The Final Product
In the end, we had a pinball machine that didn’t really work. You could say DI was a massive failure. Or, you can say that it was a FAIL, or a First Attempt In Learning. This is the first time that we have done DI as a team. And this isn’t even really the final product. No matter how much better it could have gone, we still have another chance. We can improve upon our machine for the next month, and come back to provincials with a solution that was even better than our last one. If you want to see what our machine looks like, here are some pictures of our performance!
