Destination Imagination

Destination Imagination!

Destination Imagination, also know as DI, is an international tournament in which groups of students try to solve challenges using communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creative skills. This was my very first year doing DI, but because of the Covid 19 pandemic, it looked a lot different then what it was in previous years. Normally, it would be an in-person event where you would create a skit and perform it in front of a live audience. However this year, that never happened and everybody instead created a video that would be sent to the judges for scoring. 

Anyways, enough about what DI is, let’s talk about what happened!

As you may know, DI is a team based tournament. I was put in a group with 4 other classmates, Santiago, Brooke, Carter, and Jocelyn. Fittingly, we named ourselves Jocelyn and the 4! (We first tried to call our group “Jocelyn,” but we were told it had to be more creative.) Our group was one of the scientific groups, in which we had to create a video about science. 

Our challenge was called “In Theory”. We were tasked with creating a documentary film about how a scientific law works, and how it could be bent or broken. So we started brainstorming on what law we could break.

If you want to learn more about the different challenges, you can read more about them HERE

A lot of the time, I find this part of the project very difficult and stressful. The reason being that I’m quite bad at making really big decisions. Every time I start a big project like this, I always know that this first decision will often shape the entire rest of the project, for good or for worse. In this case, picking the right scientific law to break will pretty much decide everything else in the project. Because of this, the first week or so was quite stressful for me, but we eventually decided on a law that everybody liked. That law that we chose was Archimedes principle, otherwise known as the law of buoyancy, otherwise known as the law that makes boats float. In the end, I think we chose a pretty good law. It wasn’t as obvious and simple as something like gravity, but it also wasn’t so complicated and unknown that we didn’t have a hard time researching.

Another challenging part of the first week, was reading the rules and requirements. Looking back, we really should have read the requirements of the challenge more carefully. One of the big ideas of the film was to make it look like a documentary, and we somehow completely missed it. If we were to redo our film, I think that would be one of aspects that I would pay a lot more attention towards.

Now for a topic that I feel like I’m going to talk way too much about in the future, teamwork. Yes, I’ve already said that DI is a team game, but it really is a team game. The challenges are designed for 5 to 7 people, so if the team does not work well together, you’re not going to have a finished project. Of course, no team works perfectly together and ours was no exception. Communication between team members was a big struggle, but also a big improvement. At the start of DI, we didn’t have the best communication, which would result in having Zoom meetings with only 2 group members in it. By the end, we managed to coordinate three zoom meetings in a row in which everybody could attend. Now I know that’s still not very impressive, because that’s just attendance, but it’s still an improvement.

All of the Challenge Requirements

The hardest, and also most unexpected part of DI, was how many different challenges get merged together, to create one big challenge. If you read the Challenge requirements for each challenge, you may notice that there is a lot of them. This is part of why I think DI is so hard, and why I think we didn’t win. The main point of this challenge was to break a scientific law, and I think our group did that really well. However, there was like 3 to 4 other parts of the challenge that had to be incorporated into our final solution, which increased the complexity ten fold. Adding two team choice elements, as well as making it look like a documentary and having a expert and bystander adds so many more levels to the project. This is also why I think every group including our own struggled with planning and time management. There are so many different elements that if you don’t divide and conquer and have really good time management, you aren’t going to have enough time to complete each element.

One of my main roles in DI was to create the actual machine that could break our law. My team designed a machine that would use magnets to pull a boat underwater, effectively “breaking” Archimedes Principle. However, we quickly realized a flaw in the plan. Most ordinary magnets are permanent magnets, which means that they are always magnetized. This meant if we used permanent magnets, our boat would immediately sink and never come back up again. To get around this, we decided to use an electromagnetic, which is basically a piece of iron with electrical current going around it creating a magnetic field. The advantage of using these types of magnets is that you can toggle them on and off, perfect for an anti-buoyancy machine.

It turns out that creating a pretty strong electromagnetic is really hard! It took so many failed and disappointing attempts until I finally got it working, but I’m really glad myself and my team kept believing in the idea. We came really close to switching ideas, but in the end we kept working on it and eventually got it to work.

Anti Buoyancy Prototype Video

So that’s Destination Imagination for 2021! There is another part of DI called an Instant Challenge, but sadly that’s still very secretive at the moment. Overall, DI was very different then what I had heard it was supposed to work, but this was my first time so I don’t have anything to compare it to. Although I found it very stressful, for a first attempt it wasn’t a complete failure, and I’m excited to see how we did against all the other teams.

(Update: WE CAME SECOND🎉)

If you want to check out our solution, I will post it right here!

You can also check out this blooper reel that I made, with all the outtakes from the final solution.

You can also check out my teammates perspective here👇.

Brooke

Carter

Jocelyn 

Santiago 

See you next time,

Nolan

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