Regionals for destination imaginations have just ended, but were not done yet! Provincials are just around the corner, and we are revising all our work.

Destination Imagination is a tournament that teams compete in. There are different categories that you can chose to compete in and try and build a solution to. My team of five was in the technical category. Our challenge was to create an invention that solves a problem. We had to build impact scenery that shows what the impact of the invention was. I was working in a group of five, Evelyn, Nate, Indy, and Quinn.

In the beginning it was all about understanding the challenge, we would read through the challenge book and highlight things that were important.

 

You cant really see the words but the colours are what we used to define different things. On this page you can see the yellow which was used to highlight sentences that used the word “must”, green was for the word “may”, and circling was for the word “not”. This was to help us remember important rules, so that once we were at the tournament we wouldn’t get disqualified for doing something we weren’t allowed to do, or just losing a bunch of points for something we forgot to do.

Once our team felt we understood the challenge we started coming up with ideas. This part was harder for us, we had lots of ideas but couldn’t decide on one. As soon as we had narrowed it down we would come up with another new idea. I think that this was one of our bigger mistakes, because we didn’t have a lot of time to make a plan and put everything together, so using that time trying to make decisions wasn’t very smart. If we had started building everything earlier we might have had more time to rehearse and would have been more organized.

Once we made decisions we got to work. Our goal was to create some sort of alarm clock that made your brain work in order to turn it off. This way once you managed to turn it off you were more awake then just rolling over and turning off your alarm. We wanted our invention to be something kids our age could relate to, and we knew getting up for school is hard for a lot of people. As well as making the invention we needed a story to go along with it, we all quickly agreed it would be a bout a kid who cant wake up, and this alarm clock changes his life and makes him on time to school. He becomes more productive and eventually graduates and wants to help other kids wake up on time. Once we had our story we assigned roles so we could learn our parts. The script had been written out and was ready for people to look at early on.

For our presentation we needed a backdrop, something that could be seen as more than one room. At first we just went with white because it was nice and simple, but then we realized tie die would be a lot cooler especially because our name is Tie DI. As for building our invention, that took a little longer. We needed to cut a wood box, and glue or nail it together, we also needed to create a circuit that would play a noise. We had a circuit ready before the box was built, which is fine as long as it fit into the box, which thankfully it did.

Invention aside, we still had the rest of the scenery to make, we needed three technical elements, to show the impact of our invention. This was one of the hardest thing for us, we could not come up with any ideas. We new we wanted to use mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and acoustical engineering, but we weren’t sure how we were going to use them all. After a bit we had used the first to to create a city scape background for the job interview, at the end of our skit. We still had acoustical engineering to use, we looked at our other options but didn’t really have any ideas. One day we were all talking and we came up with the of making an amplifier for a phone that was going to be playing sound effects. This is what it ended up looking like,

After a lot of work and planning not everything went right, which we were ready for. When we were preforming we kept going even if there was a mistake. Our impact scenery didn’t work which was something that we expected. Before we preformed it had been finicky and hard to work with, we had got it to work a few time right before the day of DI, but were ready for it to not work. Even though there were things that didn’t work, there were lots of things that also went well. We all knew our lines and our invention was built, and we put together a half decent performance.

 

During the day of DI we also compete in something called an instant challenge. This is a challenge that is presented to us the day of, it could be performance related or task based. I think that my team competed pretty well in this category.

Here is a video of our presentation!

 

In total I think Destination Imagination regionals went well. We have a lot to improve on but we had fun and didn’t fail miserably! All of DI prep and performance has been a big learning point. We had limited time to create something and preform it, I learned I need to manage time better and to always prepare for the worst. I’m glad I got to compete in Destination Imagination!!

 

“Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.”

-Francis Bacon