More DI! And I’m not going to explain the ominous title until later in the post because… suspense.

Anyways, unless you wanna do more reading than necessary, let me recap: I went to a tournament called DI with my team where we did an engineering challenge in which we had to drop weights into a structure. We also needed to include a dramatic impact, an even depicter that depicted said sudden event, and two team choice elements. We wrote a story about social anxiety in which I played the embodiment of anxiety and scared everyone. We got third place in our regional tournaments and moved on to provincials.

First, we had to change and improve some things. We fixed our background, and added in sound effects. School bell noises, mainly. We cut out some scenes, due to us going over time. We also improved makeup, like giving Michael freckles and Mimi wrinkles.

Provincials was… a time. Getting up at 7:00am on a Saturday wasn’t fun. We had our instant challenge at 10:00, but before that we marched into the gym.

Allow me to elaborate. We walked into the gym with this:

I can’t explain the monster I made. Do I start with Adam, who looks like a witch? Or Michael, who’s face I had to elongate? The fact that I look like a little boy on Chandler’s body? I can’t… I give up.

Instant challenge went well, though I’ve been told we can’t talk about it. There’s no legal punishment if I do, but my teacher reads these and I’d rather not have her get mad at me. Sorry.

Moving on to the main event: our team challenge. Tender Greens walked into that room with confidence. We set everything up, it was going awesome. I looked like a raccoon. I have no photos to capture the true beauty of it, so here’s a drawing I did:

Anyways. We had all the confidence in the world. Then… it was shattered. Let me go into more detail.

Scene one: Chad and Claire talk about homework. Chad, upon exiting, trips over the wire. No big deal

Scene two: Ths school bell doesn’t ring. Fine, we can handle it. Everything goes fine.

Scene 3: Doesn’t work. At all. This is supposed to be a filmed phone call scene projected onto our background. No audio, nothing. Nãda. Zilch.

Scene 4: Oh dear. Claire goes up to do her presentation, in which Anxiety (played by Myself) drops weights on the structure while Claire builds up to a panic attack. The structure decided our story was bad and snapped under pressure. Literally. One weight made it break.

 

THIS IS WHERE THE TITLES COMES INTO PLAY. While thinking of a title, I got really bummed because Breaking Chad would make EVEN MORE sense for this because something actually broke! Not Chad, he’s not mangled, he’s in one piece.

Needless to say, we were all disappointed. But, you know what, I learned a few things. I always talk about this, but I learned about team work. This group in particular proved that dividing and conquering sometimes work, but not always. It was easy to trust Adam to work on the structure, but I needed help with the story. I also learned, as they say in show biz: the show must go on. If things don’t work out, roll with it. Our phone call scene didn’t work, so we rolled with it.

Let’s get nerdy about DI!

More nerdy than usual. There’s a study out there that talks about student engagement and creative attitudes among students who go into DI versus those who don’t. People who do DI were actually more engaged andcreatuvewhen given tasks, and more imaginative then those who didn’t do DI. They were more self-confident and tenacious, and were able to think of more ideas. A whopping 86% of DI students thinkthat their teamwork skills improved in the 1-2 years of participation they did, and 92% agree that problems can be solved with multiple perspectives. Really cool, huh?

Anyways, read you later!

Sincerely, Me