Hello and welcome to my second blog post about DI. I’m not going to lie, I didn’t think that I would be writing this post. I didn’t think it would be possible to have a virtual tournament where everyone had skits and hands on challenges, but here we are. Let’s me tell you how my team solved a challenge in a challenge.

Let’s start where I left off in my post about the regional tournament. After the Regional Tournament my team started thinking of ways we could improve. Some things we looked at were where we scored low. So a big thing that we didn’t score well on was our teamwork, this is because we didn’t include Simon in the skit enough. So one of our goals for the next tournament was too include everybody. Another area we NEEDED to improve was sounds. To improve sounds we taught everybody in the group all the sounds, we also matched every power to a sound. The last thing we wanted to focus on were powers and being more dramatic with the portrayal of the powers. Our plan for this was to incorporate the powers earlier so we could use it on more things.

Us performing at Regionals

Then there were also things that we watched other teams do that we thought were good ideas.

Some specific things we were going to improve on was doing flashbacks and changing times and scenes more to make the skit more fun. Another thing is we wanted to make sure people knew what to do if they were a extra character. So you knew when to pop in and what you could say.

When my team was told that we would be doing a improv through Zoom we all felt a little overwhelmed. On our first call as a group we just troubleshooted for a hour. We tested sounds and ways to communicate. One of the struggles that we had is determining who’s talking and not talking over that person. In the end we never found a solution we just learned when to talk and when to let someone else talk. A big struggle for us was planning. When we did our practices we always needed more time to plan. Our solution to this was that every 30 seconds we went over the storyline and characters to make sure everyone was on the same page, we also decided that person who reviewed should be the assigned narrator so that they could control the story in the skit.

When we did the skit online we used all of our strategies to make sure it went smoothly. We were all very happy with how it went.

The competency was Research and Understand. At first when Ms. Willemse told us this is didn’t make sense but after doing it and writing it down every step of the way it makes sense. I think I did pretty well with this competency. While we were watching the other teams I was taking notes and looking closely at what they did and how it got them to place. Then I watched the video of our performance over and over again figuring out exactly what went well and what didn’t.

Then we had to figure out ways to do improve over zoom, so we experimented. We tried lots of different things like hands signals and what to do if your wifi cut out.

That’s how we did a improv skit over Zoom!!

Until next year!