Today I am sharing my final experience in DI this year which was the Provincial Tournament at Collingwood School.
We had been preparing for this last part of DI for about three weeks. That time included Spring Break when no real work happened, so let’s just say we had a week to prepare for the Provincial DI Tournament! We (my group: Zoe , Kaia , Lauren and Jude )had looked at our scores from the other tournament ( if you want to read about that one click HERE ) and we now knew what needed to be done in order for us to win at Provincials. I think we spent the last few days before Spring Break just compiling all of the information that we needed to know about how we were scored and what needed improvement. So now that we knew everything about what need to be fixed we headed onto to the building process.
After getting back from Spring Break we were ready to start fixing our creations as well as the script and a few other essential elements. Oh, and one other thing something happened at Regionals; the whole container broke! All of the screws had come out, one of the boards was detached, and one of the boards had to be replaced with new wood. That took sometime for me to do in my garage, but was more of and inconvenience than anything. Based on the judges comments from Regionals, we changed most of the script so that it was more interesting and kept the audience more engaged in our whole presentation. Our revised draft of the script was very weird, none of the lines made sense, the Sim suddenly had lines ( because our game we chose was the Sims) so we had to re-write the whole thing yet again. These little things did cost us time that could have been spent doing something else that might have been more important in the end.
Our last problem was our plumbob. A light up diamond that was supposed to show the Sims emotions. This as a key part of our presentation that could cost us a lot of points if not completed. This job was assigned to one member who said he would complete it sometimes after Spring Break. With all of theses little problems being dealt with, our container, props and script where coming along nicely.
Skipping ahead to one day before competition: We had our new script, and we felt confident with it. The container now had a loading screen that was painted onto it to score extra points for transformation. It had also had everything checked over to make sure we had not missed anything. Our props were all good, and the only thing missing was the Plumbob. We had hoped that it would be done by at latest the day before the tournament but it wasn’t, so we had to improvise by creating our own smaller ones out of wood. This would score us less points but would have to work for now. Oh, and another small problem – one of our teammates wasn’t coming anymore! Both these let-downs were significant to our team and really frustrating.
Day of the tournament: We were all very excited for this day. The only bad part was that we had to be there at 8:30 but our actual presentation wasn’t until 3:20, so we had about six hours to practice our skit and make sure each of us had memorized our lines. We also got to see lots of other presentations which was fun. Then at 11:20 we were called to do our Instant Challenge. After we had a team discussion and agreed that we were proud of our performance in the Instant Challenge.
Then at 3:30 we headed to our presentation stage ( just another room). Then all of a sudden we were on stage presenting in front of the judges, our teachers, our peers and lots of our families! Everyone did great; they had their lines down, all the props worked well, and even our last minute Plumbob worked as well as expected. Then as fast as it started, it was over.
This experience was amazing for me. Even with one person missing and a broken technical element, I was still very proud of my team and how well we were able to pull off our presentation. I learned how to find different ways to look at a problem and never think of the negative options first. Although there were a number of unpredictable, and maybe unwelcome, challenges, I actually think that our Provincial presentation was better than our first Regional one.
Overall, I think that DI is a great opportunity for everyone to find something they are good at and have fun doing that thing. Also it’s great for finding leadership qualities in everyone. Before PLP began, we all went to a presentation by our future teachers where they showed us an image of an iceberg, “The Iceburg of Success”, explaining that what you see on the surface is only 10% of what really goes into any great project out learning experience. I guess they were right, yet again!
That’s all for now.