Salutations guys, welcome back! Today we’re talking all about the worlds most creative tournament, DI!! Now this whole crazy adventure started in January, but a lot has happened since then, and I’m here to tell you about it! Basically DI is a competition where you present a solution to a challenge. This year there were challenges from many different categories, technical, engineering, fine arts, scientific, and more! We were told to choose the top 3 challenges that we wanted to do, and then list them in order. The challenge I picked was engineering, and I was lucky enough to actually get it! Once you have developed a challenge solution go to a regional tournament and compete,  after that everybody goes to provincials and you have one more competition. Many of the challenges have many different parts so I’m just gonna go right ahead and explain my challenge!

The engineering challenge to me looked awesome! You had to design a structure with a part that could trigger a special effect, special effects then had to be coordinated with a special appearance of a monster! Now this may sound like quite a lot, but it was actually pretty easy to understand once you read the rules. Now after we had read the rules and processed the challenge it was time to get started.

At first DI was really just about doing worksheets sheets to teach us about learning how to properly generate ideas, learning how to divide responsibility, and learning how to be a team. I will admit although as boring as it was it really helped us once we started actually developing our challenge our solution. All those worksheets that we had done to help us to divide responsibility made it so easy to divide responsibility once we really had lots of tasks to do. These worksheets we also amazingly helpful when we needed to come up with ideas. If we got stuck and we needed an idea we would take some of the techniques we had learned from the worksheets to help us make ideas. For example when we got stuck on our team choice element (a element we choose based on our skills that we performed in our performance) Ms.Williemse suggested that we try an idea generation technique called the A-to-Z generator. We took some of our skills that we had learned from previous idea generators and eventually decided on our team choice element. 

One of our idea generation techniques.

The next big step with DI was to actually start doing things. We started to build and design our structure along with our special effect. We started to design our story and characters more and lastly we really begun developing our challenge, adding props, making costumes, and even creating a dance! And let me tell you this is the when the learning really began to set it… I don’t know if you’ve ever been in group projects before but let me tell you they can sometimes be a bit of a nightmare. You need to really learn to work together. You need to know when it’s time to take charge and when you just need to let people do their thing. There were times when I would be there just pushing people gently in a direction so they could do work, and even completely just saying “You need to do this, go do this”. I think the skills I learned about teamwork in DI will definitely help me anytime in the future when I have a group project, or even in real life situations where I’m working on a team. If you want to check out my team members blog visit Alex, Matthew, Liam, Ben, and Emily’s blogs!

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This is the link to a time lapse of my group (mostly) working.

Now for the lest part of my DI experience… the tournament!! Now out of all of the stats I think the tournament taught me the most, but before I go into depth about what it taught me first let me explain what it was. The tournament was a giant gathering of all the teams in the north Vancouver, West Vancouver, and Vancouver Island area. There were several set rooms for each different challenge, and teams in different challenges would compete at different times in the different rooms during the day. At One point in the day each team would compete in an instant challenge. And instant challenge is where you go into a room and they give you a challenge you know nothing about. You then have a set time to try and complete the challenge to the best of your ability (i’m not allowed to specifically talk about my challenge until after May because they reuse challenges at regionals). Now to talk about what this tournament actually taught me… This tournament taught me so much about the importance of staying calm while performing. When I did my reflection on this tournament I talked so much about how my team needed to stay calm. In the tournament some things went wrong and my team absolutely lost our minds. We learned that if you want to perform well and if you want to succeed you cannot lose your cool. If you lose your cool you will start stressing over the smallest setbacks, and stressing never gets you anywhere when performing. Now even though our stressing led us to not perform quite as well, we had a very successful special effect and structure. This led us to do actually pretty amazingly in the overall scoring, because guess what, we won, my team Shrimps and Prime Rib won!!!!!!!!! We won both the instant challenge and the overall challenge!! We were so excited and totally surprised!

Our feedback from the judges.

Our ribbons!!!

Overall DI has taught me so much. It’s taught me so much about teamwork and how to be a leader if your group needs you to be. It’s taught me about how to divide responsibility and make sure tasks get done and don’t get shunned to the side. And perhaps even more importantly it’s taught me a lot about performing. You wouldn’t think that that’s an important thing to learn, but I have learned that you need to stay calm, cool and collected so that you perform better. I know for a fact all of these skills that I have learned will help me later in life, but especially in the provincial tournament in April! I will definitely be taking these things that I’ve learned and trying to help my group so that we can do even better next time!

Thank you so much for reading, 

  See ya! ✌️