We have been working on DI for the last month and a bit. We have faced many challenges but come through all of them. It has been an amazing experience with my group (Zoe ,Kaia ,Lauren and Jude )so far filled with fun but also losses. Here are some of the highlights and evidence of growth with DI so far.
We were put into the Fine Arts group together and given our challenge. We chose the game “The Sims” and could not wait to start. The first part of DI was mostly thinking of solutions and making jobs for people to do. We planned how we wanted our solution to go, we also assigned many jobs and other little things that needed to be done by certain dates. I see now that this part was crucial to the success of our project, but at that time seemed pretty boring.
The next thing we did was start to get the materials so we could get to building the container and completing other tasks. I had been assigned the task of getting the wood and making the container. I created a time lapse of me putting together with my father. This completed container would become our background for our “Sim” and it would be a living room.
Here is the link to the video
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It was no easy task, even though at the beginning I estimated it would only take me a few hours! In the end it took me two days to complete the whole container, then I came to a problem. The container could not move, at all. So I had to get some small wheels that could be attached to the bottom of the container to allow it to move when angled slightly. This made transportation very easy. The only thing missing now was some hinges so that our box could open up like a panel to be our background. This was a requirement on our challenge. This part was easier and was a lot more important because this would be a really big part of our presentation.
Then it got to the point of a lot of building. This is where we were just about done with planning and now we were doing. My groups script was just done so most of us had started to practice. I was painting the couch onto the container ( the other things were done by other group members) and then starting to put it together. Looking back now I think It would have been wise to attach the container in the beginning so that the painted images would have been perfectly aligned. I really enjoyed the construction phase of our challenge and glad I took on that responsibility.
At this point we were done building and now just putting final details onto our container. Most of the time we were practicing our scripts, but there was one problem. One of the main parts of our solution was still not here. One major part of our presentation was a light-up diamond that indicated the player. This thing is called a Plumbob. This was going to show who was the main actor in our skit. The problem was that the person in charge had not brought it yet. In fact it wasn’t until two days before the tournament that we get the Arduino to program the Plumbob. To me this was very frustrating, but I tried to make the best of the situation by finding other jobs that needed to be done.
The even more annoying news was that the Plumbob did not actually work until the day of our presentation! I was so excited when I finally saw our diamond lights come to life! Disappointingly in the actual presentation it still did not work fully ( it did not change colour to represent emotion change) and we lost points for that. Frustrating!
The actual presentation was exciting! I think it went well in that we executed the skit really well and everything went according to plan – kind of. The container opened which was good and it fit through the door nicely. We all remembered our lines which was good, but I think that we could have done better in this area by saying our lines with more confidence, even if we were not quite sure what our lines were. I played the father in the skit and part of my role was to play the ukulele and tell ‘Dad jokes’. I had fun, even if I did rush a bit.
Another part of DI that could have been better was our Instant challenge ( which is like a short challenge that you can’t prepare for). I think we could have read the instructions more carefully and realized that we were doing something incorrectly in the first place. This would have given us more time to think about what we could do instead of just rushing to finish the challenge.
Looking back on the whole tournament I think it went really well, especially as this was our first time at DI. My team did a really good job on the presentation and we tried our best at our Instant Challenge. I think that if we look over what happened (we have already watched the video of it a few times) and the scores a little more then we could definitely destroy at Provincials with a few minor tweaks and improvements. Over all, Regionals was a success and I can’t wait for Provincials in a few weeks time.
That’s all for now!