Destination imagination is a very well known and liked organization around the world. They hold competitions around the world where teams compete presenting different challenges compete for first place. It is the second year now that the class has done, and it doesn’t seem to different from last time we did it. We were put in groups in early January and got straight to work on a fairly large project.

I was put in the scientific challenge with Quinn, Tyler, Ruby and Makyla. Our challenge was to create a story about a top secret mission involving a disguised character a secret gadget and two team choice elements. I’ll start off with our story. It was set in World War III where robots are slowly taking over the world. We (my group), are a small detachment of human rebels stuck in a secret base. We are trying to receive the code to shut of the robots and Tyler is the disguised character trying to stop us, because spoiler alert, he is the evil genius who created the robots. The code we are getting to shut off the robots is the insta crypted message that the DI officials give us. We developed a code using shapes that translated into letters, this was the code that could be any three word sentence in the world. During the presentation a group member, in this case Tyler, had to go off stage and encrypt the message. Later on in the presentation the rest of the group got the code and had to decrypt it, this was the code that shut off the robots. The next code was the one that identified the enemy, which was Tyler. This one was a sequence of random words, but every second letter of these made up their own word when put together. In the end, I think everything workedout the way we wanted it to and I am very happy with what we did.

The process of creating this was very long. For the first couple of weeks we planned everything out. What we were saying, what we were doing and all things like that. The first thing we did was create the script. We thought if we did this first, everything else would just fall into place and it would be easier to organize the presentation. During the script making process we thought it would also be productive to create the codes. We researched steganography and cryptography and found, what we thought would be the best way to hide our messages. We then started designing our two team choice elements. We decided on two things, an animation of the robots and a back board we would perform in front. We got the would for back board and started to work designing how it would stand up and how we would put iPads on it. Me and Tyler cut the pieces of wood to shape and managed to get the big pieces to stand up. We designed shelves to hold the iPads and screwed them onto the backboards. On the iPads we would put the animations that we had created as a demonstration of the robots. With that we had finished what we needed and it was time for the tournament.

Our team did a lot better than we thought we would have done an I think we were all proud of what we had accomplished. The whole class did very well on the tournament and we are all going to provincials in early April. We can’t wait to to do this and we will continue to improve all our projects.