So this is another blog post about my amazing experience at the Destination Imagination provincial tournament. 6:22 am, I woke up too early for DI. 6:40am we headed to Destination Imagination with all of our props. 8:00 am, we arive at the high school in Surrey British Columbia.

Destination Imagination, or DI for short, is a tournament where teams from different schools compete against each other and try to finish set challenges. This year my team chose the engineering challenge. This was a task to create a structure that would have to be under 25 grams, be made of balsa wood and hold as much weight as possible. Then we had to create a story that would go along with this and it had to be on a international issue.

We prepared by planning the performance aspect of this project first and put more focus into the structure later. We started by brainstorming about what the topic should be and we came up with global warming. We thought this would be a great topic because this is a big issue for the whole world with the polar ice caps melting. Then we included different nations and at the end had them agree on how they could fix this issue. They worked together to build a rocket (the structure) to explore living on another planet.  We used a projector to show a picture of the inside of the rocket and played the sound and countdown for the rocket lifting off.

My group consisted of Lucas, Adam, Sam, Michael and myself. When it came time to present our story as well as our structure we had little bumps like the background falling over and not having enough time for the structure testing. We ended up putting 90 pounds on our structure and doing very well compared to our last presentation in terms of presenting and making the structure work. Even though we had a much better presentation compared to last time we still ended up placing lower than I hoped.

I learned a lot of different things from problem solving, thinking on your feet, engineering, script writing and presenting. I even learned about double checking important facts because we weighed the structure with more than one scale the second time around.

I believe that this is a great challenge for kids to undertake outside of school if they would like to try it.

Here are some photos