What is DI?

So DI is back and better than ever. This year in DI, the regional tournament was different. It was different because it was hosted at Seycove Secondary, the home of PLP. So if you are new to my blog or have just never heard of DI or Destination Imagination before then the last sentences won’t make sense. I will do a quick explanation of what DI is exactly.

Destination Imagination is like an education sports tournament basically. The idea is to put a team together of 2 to 7 people and then pick a set challenges out of several options. Your team has to think of an idea to solve this problem/challenge. After figuring out how to solve this problem your team integrates this solution into a skit and performs in front of judges. The judges evaluate your performance and your solution  to the problem and give you an overall score. This score is put against other team scores and the team with the highest score wins the tournament. Oh wait there is one more part. There is a second part called an instant challenge which is where your team will be given a problem/challenge on the spot and you have to solve the problem to the best of your ability.

 

Maze Craze

Alright so now that you know what DI is it is time to get back on  track. So, yes DI regionals were hosted at Seycove. My group this year consisted of 6 people, Calum, Sam, Isobel, Izzy, Kate and myself. Our challenge was Maze Craze. This challenge was to make something that would navigate a maze while making it to two different event squares and completing a task. For more info on my challenge, click on the Maze Craze blue word. So our team got to thinking  about how we could solve the challenge and integrate it into a story. We thought that we would create an RC  or remote control car from scratch and code it so that it would go through the maze by its self. This was a very ambitious idea.

The next thing that we had to think about was the story that we would present with the car we called the rover. We thought that the rover would be a bomb defusing robot that would defuse two bombs at the two different event squares. So then we came up the story that I would be at my 50th family reunion and that I would be telling a story of the first time I was on the NYPD bomb squad.  We built a large storybook out of sheets of plywood hinged together and painted so we could turn the plywood like a page to go with different scenes of the skit.

Please watch the video of our performance and the unexpected breakdown that we had to work around in this blue link below.

Destination Imagination Regional Performance

As you can see after watching the video you can tell that the rover didn’t work to plan. What happened was that the one side of the car where the gears line up didn’t fit properly. It is all trial and error and these things happen when you are making something from scratch. While we were doing the performance and the rover stopped working it showed the judges our improv skills where we skipped the script and improvised to integrate the rover not working into the storyline. The good think is that we have another chance at Provincials to work on the rover and make it more reliable.  I had to leave later because I was part of the Seycove senior boys basketball team playing for the Howe Sound Championship.  Seycove won which was exciting but I missed the instant challenge but I rushed back to Seycove to help later in the day.

Overall it was a fun experience to host the 2018 Destination Imagination regional tournament and it was done well. It was a lot of work for the teachers so thanks to them and it made it a lot easier for us to not have to lug our supplies to Surrey. All of the Seycove teams have qualified for Provincials so let’s we how that goes.  We’re going to improve the robotic car and use better parts for the next competition.