(Insert witty pun here)

DI Regionals have come and gone, and its time to reflect. My post last year goes into more detail, but Destination Imagination is a tournament in which teams in different skill levels create a solution to a challenge. We then present these solutions to the Appraisers who judge us based on numerous factors. This year, I did the engineering challenge again, called Drop Zone.

Our challenge was to build a structure that is meant to support weight that is dropped onto it. We then need to create a presentation around that structure. We also had to have an Event depicter, which was a visual or auditory depiction of a Sudden event in the story. My Team was Myself, Luca J., Logan, Robin, and Isabelle. We were a Senior Level (SL) team, called The Droplets.

We all participated in the solution in different ways. Robin built the event depictor, which was a seismograph. Luca and Isabelle made the backdrop, which was a canvas that opened, revealing a science lab and a forest-y alternate dimension. Logan helped with a little bit of everything, but mostly helped with the design of different things and props. And I built the structure.

I built the structure out of Balsa wood and wood glue. At first, we were having trouble with the design, but I came up with a solution; Mortise and Tenon joints. A mortise is a cut hole or grove in something, usually wood for furniture. The Tenon is the reverse, and piece of wood that sticks out and fits into the mortise. After the mortise and tenon are tight, the carpenter glues the together.

Making these weren’t super difficult. I couldn’t use power tools, because they would just chew up the wood, so i used an exact-o knife. Using one wasn’t difficult, it was just tedious as there were a lot of them to make. 16 mortises and 16 tenons.

Next, I added supports. I didn’t mortise and tenon them, because that would be too difficult. Instead, I used something called a butt joint. Weird spelling, i know. These were put in the middle of each face, with two others butt jointed at an angle on each side.

Next, I added the final pieces: gussets. These triangular shaped pieces were glued onto the sides of the joints to add extra stability and support. At this point, the structure has very little weakness. The gussets make it more difficult for the structure to “parallelogram”, or slant sideways.

This isn’t the only design for a gusset, this is just one, and the style I used.

REGIONALS

Regionals were here at Seycove, so we had a home team advantage. What that advantage was, I have no idea.

Our presentation was about a seismologist named Dr. Underwood who was studying the effects of damage to tectonic plates. He created a pocket dimension with our other main characters in them. The other characters we called the “Droplets”, played by Robin, Luca and Isabelle. I was the teacher showing the documentary to the students (audience). I was also the backstage special effects guy.

Dr. Underwood created a pocket dimension, and placed the droplets in said dimension. After some exposition, he began dropping the weights onto our structure. Our structure represented the tectonic plates under the droplets dimension. This began a series on natural disasters, in which the droplets responded with a comedic twist to all but the last one. During the first disaster, a rockslide, robin got hit with a rock, and had to pretend to be injured. In the second, a tsunami came, and none of the droplets were able to swim. During the last, and actual earthquake, the droplets were freaking out. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get earthquake sounds to play loudly enough to be heard. I did have them playing, but no one could hear them.

(video here)

PROVINCIALS

Provincials were similar, but at Johnston Heights instead of Seycove. We had the same story, same structure, same costumes, and the same problem with the earthquake sounds. We did have improvements, however. Because I was behind the backdrop, I couldn’t see how many weights Logan had dropped, so my team had to queue me in. They had very specific lines they were supposed to say, and we practiced it until they new all of their queues. Unfortunately, the volunteers had to destroy my structure both times to make sure I wasn’t cheating. I have a video of them destroying the second one.

INSTANT CHALLENGES
We also had instant challenges, challenges we didn’t know anything about until we got there. Unfortunately, I legally can’t talk about them, so enjoy this nice picture of some flowers instead.

During this multi-month event, I learned more about working together as a team. Speaking of which, we worked really well. We all did our own thing, working on a single part of the presentation. But we were able to combine it all together really well, which is something I was both expecting to happen, but I doubted it would.
As with last year, I certainly wouldn’t want to do it again, but it wasn’t unenjoyable. It could have been more fun, but then it wouldn’t be a challenge.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*
*