Considering that I am terrified of public presentation, DI has been the nightmare of PLP that has haunted me since I’ve started. Since grade 8, I’d known that I’d eventually have to participate in the competition. DI is a tournament throughout the world, where you are put into groups and have to collaborate with new people to create a solution to a problem. What scared me the most about DI was the actual presenting part of the solution. The day of the competition, my group was very underprepared. But with some last minute problem solving, and some tears, we were able to pull through with a winning solution.
Since January, I have been working with 4 different people to complete our solution. I was a part of the Technical area, which meant that we had to work together to create a giant working pinball machine, and an entire story based off an action movie of our choice. After much debate, and many votes, my group decided on Back to the future! We worked together to create a 1 metre by 2 metre machine, and a very last minute and complicated story. Even though we had 2 months to complete everything, we all left everything a bit last minute. Since we didn’t have a concrete script to go off of, I feel as though our story had more flow to it and seemed more natural.
Machine:
One of the biggest components for our section was creating an actual machine. My group and I discussed and gave out specific tasks to everyone. I was left to work on creating a base for our machine. I had a lot of fun cutting and attaching the wood, because I got to learn a lot of new skills and got to spend some quality time with my dad. Since he’s an engineer, he has a lot of machines and knowledge to share with me. I learned a lot and discovered that I actually really like building machines and structures.
Story:
Our group were definitely lacking in a structured story. Almost our entire presentation was improv and was made up to morning of. Surprisingly we were able to pull through and create a working story that felt original but you could also tell was based off of back to the future. We tried our hardest to incorporate our machine into our , even if it was only involved by Spotify premium.
The most embarrassing part of our story though, was our song. We decided to incorporate a team choice element by singing a song that was written by a team mate of mine. He took the classic “money money money” by ABBA and changed the lyrics to fit the theme of our presentation.
Although I was extremely nervous and scared about DI leading up to it, I really enjoyed it and had a lot of fun. The teachers actually warned us about this exact situation, and knew that I would look back and like DI. It may not be my first choice of how to spend my weekends, I know that I learned a lot of valuable information about working with new people and overcoming challenges.
(Ignore how bad the quality, I have no idea what happened to it)