It happened again

I dont even know why im writing this but here we go

warning you now this is gonna be a long one

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Life of Colton. For the past 2 months my life has been filled with this blessing of a project called Destination Imagination.

What’s Destination Imagination you may ask?

DI (for short) is a global competition where teams are given a problem and they are given time to create a story and present they’re solution to the problem to a panel of judges. This year the category’s to chose from were; technical, fine arts, scientific, and improvisational. the category’s determined what the question was and how it would be solved. Last year, Because of how serious covid was, our solution to be submitted through a video, which meant the time table was a little more relaxed. This year it would be hosted in person, which none of our cohort had experience with so it would be quite the experience…

Way back in December I think it was, we were hit with the DI bomb. Same thing as last year, we voted on what category we wanted to do. Last year I did fine arts, and while my team was very successful, I wasn’t a huge fan. So this year I begged to the DI gods that I would get into technical. (Which sounded pretty cool to me).

A couple weeks later, our groups were made, and the DI gods clutched up. I got into technical and I was paired up with a ton of my friends. And then

nothing

Nothing Happened for the rest of December. Im not too sure why, but I do know when we got back after winter, it was go time.

Our team went into this competition un prepared. I think in the end, only a couple of our teammates read the full rulebook. It also didn’t help that we had the smallest group, only containing 5 people. Our competition, the other PLP 9 tech team had 7. We knew this would be tough from the start.

The first part of the process would be to create rolls and responsibility’s for the creation of our solution and our instant challenges (more on that later). After that class, everyone had a foggy, but still had an idea, of what they’re job was for the solution

Each teams solution must be presented with a story, and we’re all pretty creative people in this group. So our entire story was created on a FaceTime call. We just had random ideas shoot into our heads and we put we wrote it down. We then took those ideas and created a structured story with a beginning middle and end. It was rough, very rough, but it was a good starting point.

once we had a idea of what would happen in the story. We met up outside of school to finnaly get to work. For the technical challenge, we needed to make 2 machines. One machine could not use any electricity whatsoever. And one could use as much electricity as you like. The machines had to make a daring escape through 3 hazards (which are like obstacles). We could now create the devices modelled after our story. After we met up. We had the chassy for our electric device done. It steered, it drove, using the lego mind-storms motor and R/C receiver.

Now this was great, but it gave us a lot of bad self confidence. We thought we were totally ahed when in fact, we were not. We still had a lot more work, especially since we hadn’t even thought about our second machine yet. Reality hit when we realized how close the competition was, and that’s when we really started getting to work. We started making our second device which we decided would be “gravity powered” (which is just a cool way of saying it rolls down a ramp).

Both machines had been made and we had completed a successful dress rehearsal. We went into spring break confident that everything was fine, when in fact. It was not.

We came back and got out butt whopped. Our choreography was disorganized, we had barely run through our story at all, and we had a ton of forms due. The week before the competition was an absolute mess. We scrambled to get our forms done, get the machines working, finnish the hazards, and organizing spectators and transportation to the tournament. It was a mess, but in the end we pulled it together and made it work.

The day of the tourney was an exiting one. We all got together before hand to pack up the car, and make sure we were all ready. One of the issues we were having was the size of the tunnel. The gravity powered device kept running into the side of the tunnel, but we made a new one that was much wider and before we loaded it up we made sure it worked properly.

We headed to Safeway for some snacks and before we knew it, we were chauffeured to Saint Georges High School in the fleet of Honda Odysseys, One carrying our equipment and one carrying us.

We arrived, we brought our stuff in and got ready to go and preform. It was actually really nerve racking no matter how much we tried to play it down. When we were getting to go, we did one final check in to make sure everything was good. It wasn’t. All of the sudden the gravity powered device would hit the side of the ramp, get stuck at the mouth, or it would work. We did not want to go into this with a 30% success rate. We had no choice. We went in and preformed.

We came out pretty disappointed and confused. Everything performance wise, went great. The machines however, thought otherwise. Our electric dune buggy decided to lose a wheel on the last stage of the hazards, and after 3 tries the gravity power device made it through the tunnel, but stopped dead at the next.

luckily the story went well and our team choice elements* (unique additions to the story special to each team.) went very well and they loved that.

After the main solution we then went to the instant challenge room

colton, what’s an instant challenge?

An instant challenge is a timed challenge, which is completely improvisational. The challenge is given to the your team which can be to either create a object made out of a limited amount of supplies, like making a tower out of a limited amount of paper and mailing labels and things of that nature. Then there’s a performance based instant challenge, where the appraisers give you a imaginary situation to act out. They give you a certain amount of time to prepare and a certain amount of time time present.

Luckily for us we had experience in instant challenges ad we had been practicing both types of challenges in school. Im not sure how much im supposed to share about this, because apparently we get disqualified if we share too much, but ill say this. It was pretty redeeming.

After the IC it was over, DI 2022 had come to an end. It was actually pretty fun in the end. I really enjoyed working with my team. We headed to 5 guys restaurant to enjoy a well deserved burger for the 2 months of destination imagination.

So were at the end. Looking back, the in person DI, while it’s much more work and much more stressful, its much more fun and rewarding. So what did I learn and what do I think I would do differently next time.

Well for starters our group was not on top of things. We, in my opinion, were the most disorganized team in the class. Things got done, but not very organized. Our time wasn’t managed super well, and I thought we could’ve put a little more thought and effort into our hazards and devices and that if we did, our solution would’ve been more sucessful.

Through out this project, i’ve learnt about the values of hard work, organization, teamwork, a big one, communication and many many more.

My favourite part of this project was probably working with my team outside of school in a relaxed environment. While it may seem unproductive, we actually got more done than we did in class!

So all and all even though the results didn’t turn out in our favour, I really think that we had fun, learnt valuable lessons and experienced what its like to control your own project.

Next year is going to be big, I can feel it

My names Colton Wallin and with that, have a good day!