Let me be real honest: This Project was “memorable”. By that I mean It was a bit of a hurricane and by the time it was regionals I wanted to DI! DI! DI!

(DI stands for Destination Imagionation. No I’m not misspelling DIE. I’m attempting humor.)

“You can’t spell disaster without DI.”

 

Okay First… what the heck is Destination Imagination?!

Destination Imagination is a project. Duh. You are divided into groups of four. Though you can have from 2-7 people in a group. And then assigned a category. There are five categories for the middle school-high school level: Change Of Tune-a musical play challenge, Drop Zone-engineering challenge where you drop weights onto a structure, Treasure-an improv challenge, Unlikely Attraction-a challenge where you use scientific methods to create an theme park attraction and finally the challenge I did: Maze Craze–a challenge where you have to build a maze traveler to navigate a maze. Click on the names of the challenges highlighted  in red if you want to learn more about it.

Solution to the challenge

My groups solution to the challenge was to create a sort of robot and present a story that went along with it and depicted it’s travel through the maze. We were planning on using an arduino to code it. I didn’t work.

But we had to create a prop transformation and an object removal. We had a bit of trouble with the prop transformation but the object removal worked pretty well. Our prop transformation idea was to set off elephant toothpaste and on the day of it didn’t really work  Our object removal idea was to have a key inside the maze with a magnet attached to it and a little arm with a magnet attached to it which would attach to the key. That one did work really well.

We also had to create two team choice elements. Team choice elements are two creations of your teams choice that reflect what your team is interested in. My team created a video of how we did the makeup for one of our characters and we chose our costumes as one of our team choice elements.

OH NO! TROUBLE!!!

So two weeks before the regional was set to start, our mechanic whom had told us that he/she could program our robot, turned out to not really know much about that and mad been stringing us along for a while. This lead to MAJOR panic. So with the clock ticking my group and I decided to buy a robot and strip it down to the chassis. Because then at least we had something that could drive through the maze. Then on the day of the competition disaster struck. The shovel we had on our robot, which was going to be used to dispense liquid into our prop for it to transform, started to leak. But we scraped along, we had one of our team members pour the liquid into the container and then have it work but the transformation ended up not actually working at all. Fun. But all in all regionals turned out okay and we landed in 3 rd place.

(I’m that kid in the front row, 4th from the left who isn’t even looking at the camera)

Reflection

I am glad I did DI but I won’t lie… it wasn’t easy but it paid off BIG TIME. It was an experience that I will never forget. I learnt many skills, most notably leadership. I would like to next time have a better group dynamic within my group. The workload wasn’t the most evenly balanced. But what I found my group did learn how to do was to exploit our strengths to get over our weaknesses.