For this blog post, I’m going to be talking about one of PLP’s yearly traditions DI. What is DI? DI is a student lead challenge wherein small groups you are tasked with something like building a drone, and you have to complete that task then present your solution in the form of a story. In this blog post, I’m going just to be talking about what I think were the three most important stages of this project. Those stages are 1, 2, and 3 I picked these because I believe they helped me and will also help me show you what we did and what I learned.
For stage 1, what we did was we got our groups (mine was Fin, Ryan, Grace, Owen, Kia, and I), then we got our actual challenge mine was technical. Then finally, we started learning about what we had to do for our challenge, which, in my case, was to build an invention that solves a real-world problem. Overall I think this was a significant milestone because It helped develop our understanding of what we would have to do for this project and helped get us into the mood of problem-solving. If I were to have done this stage again, I probably would have spent more time learning about my challenge because we made a few errors in our design phase.
For stage 2, what we had to do was start generating Ideas for our story, invention, elements, etc. The ideas I generated were for our invention, which was an automatic fridge door closer, which sounds pretty interesting but really isn’t. Other than the invention, I didn’t come up with any other ideas, although I did help some people come up with ideas. Overall this was probably the most or second most important stage we had to do for this project. If I were to do this again, I probably would have spent more time and picked a different idea because the one we went with ended up being hard.
For the final stage, I’m going to be talking about stage 3 what we had to do for stage 3 was we had to start planning for what materials we were going to need. We also had to do a ton of sheets for planning what we would do if things went wrong, for example, if our invention didn’t work. Finally, we had to finalize what our deliverables were going to be (an example of a deliverable would be our invention.) Overall this wasn’t the hardest stage, but it did take a lot of work mostly because it required doing a lot of forms. If I were to do this stage again, I would spend more time on the risk management forms since we ended up having a problem with our invention that I didn’t cover in the risk management sheet.
In conclusion, even though DI can be very stressful, it’s always fun. Overall when we ended up performing lots of things went wrong, for example, our invention didn’t work, and the door of the fridge fell off, but I still think it went pretty well. One really good thing was that this isn’t our last chance to do this show. We have one more tournament to try again (the other tournament ended up being cancelled because of COVID-19, although we are still presenting just to our class.)