This term in Maker we have been working on something called Destination Imagination or DI for short. In DI you have a team and you have to create a solution to your challenge. There were 5 challenges that my class could do. We typed our top 3 choices in a Google form then our teachers decided who was doing what challenge. The choices were Engineering, Scientific, Technical, Improv and Fine Arts. If you would like to find out more about the challenges you can visit the Destination Imagination website. I picked the Engineering as my first choice and I was lucky enough to get my first choice. My other team members are Holly, Alex, Ben, Matthew and Liam.

When we started DI we started off by filling out a bunch of forms. There were things like deciding who was in charge of what and how we would make decisions. I don’t think that my group stuck to what we wrote on the forms. For example we said that we would vote for some things if we could not agree but I don’t remember voting at all.

The next part that we did was brainstorming. I think that this was the part that took up too much of our time. The first part of brainstorming was the idea generation boxes. Each person in our group had to write in boxes then cut them up so we could sort them with our group. We picked out the ideas we all liked and put aside the ones we didn’t really like. I would say that at this point we kept about less than half of our good ideas. As we brainstormed more we kept coming up with better ideas and figuring out how to put them together. As part of the Engineering challenge we had to build a structure that could hold weight and also could not be over 175 grams. Also we could only use materials that were listed in the instructions. We experimented with pop cycle sticks and glue guns to try and come up with a design. Another challenge requirement is that we have to have a special effect that is either trigged by weight placement or weight removal. A bit later we experimented with designs for triggering the special effect. Once we had a design we bought balsa wood because it is really light and we started to build the structure. We brainstormed about the story and how we are going to fit everything into our story. Once we had some good ideas we started building everything.

Some of the biggest things we had to build was the structure, the counter, the backdrop, the special effect and we had to choreograph a dance. We all worked on different things and told each other what we thought we could improve on. We also built smaller things like the props too. By the last week it seemed  like we still had so much to do but not enough time to do it. We were staying late after school almost every day to make sure that we could finish everything before the tournament. We finished everything on the last day and the one full practice we did went terrible.

On the day of the tournament we practiced a lot without props and it went pretty well. We had our instant challenge first and we thought we did pretty well but I was still nervous about the main challenge. We went to check in our structure to make sure that it met all the requirements and it was slightly to tall so we had to push it down but that ended up causing our special effect to go off early. When we were setting up our performance our backdrop broke. Our whole group was freaking out and worrying that it was going to fall. Overall our performance was better than our dress rehearsal but it did not go nearly as smooth as we would have hoped. We definitely want to put a LOT more weight on our structure in provincials.

When they were presenting the rewards my group ended up winning 1st place in our challenge and in our instant challenge. I don’t know how that happened and if we perform the same way at provincials we definitely won’t be as lucky.