Hey guys, you should know that for the last few months our class has been participating in a competition called Destination Imagination (DI). I made a blog post about the lead up to regionals and the competition itself before spring break you can read it here. Anyway, in this post I’m going to be talking about the weeks that lead up to provincials and provincials itself. After regionals there was only a week before spring break and then we only had a week after spring break before provincials so you can imagine that we were super stressed out.
Ms.Willemse and Mr.Hughes had found a tool that could help us track our progress towards a better solution, this was called a burndown chart. A burndown chart is a chart that tracks the percentage of things you have completed so the more you do the lower the percentage it will be, hence the name burndown. I found that when we started the chart we overestimated how much we could actually do which lead to problems of being at, say, 50% when really we should be at 12%. One affect this mistake had on our team was that we just gave up on the chart because since it wasn’t accurate we felt like the effort we had put in wasn’t really doing anything and there was still so much to do that we worked less. I’m not saying that it’s the complete cause of our procrastination I’m just saying that it was one of many reasons.
On the topic of procrastination, I would have to say that in the two weeks we spent “preparing” for provincials was one of the worst times I have ever procrastinated. Although I was probably one of the more productive people in my group I was pretty bad at getting my group to do anything useful, myself included. We all made up reasons why we couldn’t do a proper run through of a skit because, at least for me, we were worried that we were going to be horrible and have no time to fix it. This thought process lead us to not do a proper run through until the day before the tournament and even then we were missing a member. If I could do it all over again I would probably force my team to do multiple run throughs of a skit, which is pretty obvious but it would have probably cleared up a problem we had while preforming that almost brought our whole performance down.
You’re probably wondering what that problem is that I’m talking about, well you’re going to have to read the rest of the post to find out. However since we’re on the topic of something a provincials I might as well talk about how it went. Our presentation was hilarious, at least that’s what the judges said, and we rocked our instant challenge. I think what really helped us with our solution was that the tale we were given was really open ended so we could just keep preforming until we wanted to do the flip instead of having to do the flip because of lack of story. Another thing that I think lead to our success was that Felix was kind of narrator for the skit, the tale was “the figureheads are modelling hats in a fashion show” and Felix was the announcer, he is really good at making stuff up as he goes along so we had almost endless material to work off of. Mow since you’ve read up to here I’ll tell you what the problem was, well one of the rules of our challenges was we weren’t allowed to use props and one of our team members started to make huge gestures with his hat. He would take it off then put it on and used it in a very obvious way that it was meant to be acknowledged and we could have gotten disqualified but luckily the judges decided to let us go without disqualification or deductions.
After the challenge we had to complete an instant challenge but I’m not allowed to talk about it until after globals so once they’re done I’ll update this post to include insight towards our instant challenge. Now, since I have nothing else that I can talk about I’ll reflect on the award ceremony. All the PLP kids were sitting together in our various teams waiting for our challenge to be called and the awards to be given out. Our challenge was one of the last ones so you could imagine the suspense because we didn’t know at the time if we had been disqualified or had points taken away. The way they announce it is they go from third to first so for us when they had announced third and second we were freaking out because you either win or you get nothing. The suspence was crazy until the announcer called our name and the whole PLP student body started to scream, it was chaos, but it didn’t stop there. After they had given us the first place trophy he lady said “Don’t go anywhere because you also won the instant challenge!” We were all so happy because we had worked so hard to win this and a tiny mistake that any of us could have made almost brought us down. I have learned to love and hate DI but I still am excited for next year.