Hi everyone,
On February 29 a large event was held at my school, and this post is going to be about it. The event was called Destination Imagination or DI for short. We were competing in teams of 4-6 kids from our class.
What is DI? It involves teams competing at tournaments in which they present a solution to a problem. There are six categories you can compete in. My school competed in 5 of the categories, they were, Technical, Engineering, Fine Arts, Scientific, and Improv. I was apart of the technical team. This year we had to create a technical invention to solve a problem. We also had to make a story which shows how our invention solves the problem. Finally, we had to create impact scenery which demonstrated the impact of solving the problem. Here is a video which explains the basis of our challenge.
The first stage of this project was called, Recognize. We started this project off not building our solution, but understanding our problem. This project had many stages just like the launch cycle, you can check out my post on that here. In order to create a solution, you need to understand the problem. We were given documents to read. We also had to do a lot of research to understand our problems.
The second stage was called, Imagine. This stage involved coming up with new ideas and building on existing ones. We researched a lot during this stage. We had to research elements of our possible solution. We also had to figure out if elements were possible.
The third stage was Initiate and Collaborate. In this stage we had to research how things would work and build them. This also involved lots of collaboration. We created many blueprints. Finally we created our full scale model at the end of this stage
The 4th stage was Assess. This stage included evaluating your models, and figuring out what revisions you had to make. We jumped between assess and Initiate and Collaborate many times.
The Final stage was Evaluate and Celebrate. For this stage we presented our solution to our challenge, and celebrated our successes. Now I will explain our Solution.
Our problem for our challenge was a lack of productivity. We attributed this to not being able to wake up in the morning. We decided we should make a better Alarm clock. My teammates were Annie, Evelyn, Nate, and Indy. Go checkout their blogs! Our alarm clock had a puzzle above it which you needed to solve to turn off the alarm. We had a circuit inside, which played an alarm sound. We included the puzzle, to wake people by stimulate their brains in the morning. We also had a story and Impact Scenery. You can see our presentation below!
The competency we were being assessed on was, Research and Understand. I feel I’ve done a very good job on this competency. At the start of the project I read over the rules of our challenge, and DI in general, to understand them. I also used a couple of methods to assist my research, I highlighted any important rules. Another example of this competency was when we were creating the alarm clock, we weren’t sure how we’d make it, so we researched what was the easiest cheapest way to make it. We ended up bringing in my snap circuit board.
We may have finished regionals, but we are not done DI. We will be heading to provincials on April 4th. Our team needs to improve on many things. We need to improve the circuit inside our invention. This didn’t work on stage. We also need to improve both our Impact scenery (the pulleys), and our backdrop. We will add wooden supports to our backdrop. For the pulleys, we will use carabiners instead of the plastic wheels. Finally we will improve the dance. I personally did a terrible job on the dance and need to improve. The way we will improve the dance is practicing it.
I feel we did well in DI but there is a lot of work to be done. We still have many things to improve. Come back in mid-April to checkout my final DI blog post. Also make sure to checkout my group members blogs.
