Hello! You might be surprised about this post, but although the provincial tournament for Destination Imagination was canceled, that didn’t stop PLP! After our last competition – check out that post here – the appraisers threw away our bridge. This meant that we had to rebuild a new bridge. Our goal was to get it done in the two weeks we had left before spring break.

While rebuilding our bridge, we tried to focus on the one huge problem we had last time: NOT BUILDING THE BRIDGE FAST ENOUGH!  This was a serious issue because we then ran out of time to finish our skit. But how would we accomplish this? Our goal was to have less pieces. We attempted this, but it was difficult. It meant that each piece had to weigh the same amount, but be bigger. We didn’t get a chance to finish it however, because then came spring break.

Another change we decided to try and make was more practicing. Well, I’m not sure if it’s a change, but it would have certainly been from last time. We thought more practicing could help us assemble the bridge faster, and with greater ease. Also, if you watched the previous video, it would mean less stalling for me and Jakub!

There was 1 other change I decided to make to the back drop. In our last performance (ok, if you haven’t looked at the other post and watched the video, I would definitely suggest it now.) the backdrop didn’t flip pages properly. I kind of knew this would happen, but I had tried my best to fix it. I was proud of all the work I did, but still slightly disappointed. I tried weighing the sides backwards with rocks to the middle page would flip easier, I tried cutting pieces off the bottom of the middle piece so it wouldn’t drag along the ground, I tried… You get the idea. On the last maker class we had, I finally got an idea I really hoped would work. It was to lift the outside “pages” off the ground. Arrrggghhhh! Finally, something worked, only to find out we wouldn’t be doing DI.

But wait! There was hope! The PLP teachers decided that we should do a DI tournament online! Well, on Zoom. We were so excited! Well, maybe not that excited. I was glad all our work wasn’t going to waste though.

The next step was to figure out how we were going to present our solution without actually being able to see each other. Especially since we didn’t have a bridge! (It was at school.) This required a lot of brainstorming. We met up 3 times to rehearse and think of ideas. We came up with this: Randy, Keenan, and Jakub would each make their own bridge. They would be builders trying to come up with a design, and each bridge would be their model. Keenan made a bridge out of paper, Jakub out of popsicle sticks, and Randy out of the original idea: cards. Here’s the script so you can see how this all fit into the story:

 

We used the backdrops feature on zoom to change backdrops to look like where we were in the story.

Here are the 2 we used.

Oops, I forgot to talk about how we actually did online in our presentation. We did really good! I’m really proud of some of the improvements we made. These included: 

• Working really well together
• Being more fluent with the lines
• Not having to improvise
• Keeping it under 8 minutes
• Having the bridges cooperate, and not fall over!

One problem we did have was during our instant challenge. It was a performance based one. During the “planning” time, we did not talk all that much. We had trouble getting ideas going, and so our presentation did not involve all that much stuff. It was basically just us talking, in a slightly nonsensical way. 😀😡🙄😝

Well, bye for now!

-Kate.