Recognize Challenge

Our assigned challenge was called drop zone.
What we had to do was create a free standing structure that was less than 175 grams with materials such as cork, wood, fishing line, glue or rubber bands, this structure also had to have the strength to hold more than 120 pounds.

Study the Rules

Along with each challenge there came a book, this book educated us in each and every rule to do with our challenge. Such as, the scoring, measurements, specifications and of course our forms. For a few days before we actually started brainstorming and sharing ideas, we just looked over this book and got to know our challenge as well as possible.

 

Imagine

The first thing that we did was use a idea generation chart to get our ideas out onto paper, the task was for each team member to fill in 15 little boxes with big or small ideas and then cut out the squares and organize them. This was a great way for us to get our brains to start thinking creatively for what was ahead of us.

During this time we also began to realize each of our team members’ strengths and worked based on them, Luca and I are artistic and creative, Owen and Robin are into building and Logan is great with science and technology. We were constantly collaborating throughout the whole project but we focused on our strengths in order to make everything the best that we could.

 

Construction

After endless amounts of planning and research we finally began to take action and do the physical part of this project. Luca and I worked on our back drop, which is composed of a wood frame, canvas stretched around the sides and door hinges to connect them. While we worked on our backdrop, Owen worked on our structure, which is made of balsa wood, wood glue and fishing wire, and Robin constructed our event depicter, which was made of wood, and lego mindstorm.

As we built, we memoized lines, built props and practiced. This stage was very time consuming and was a lot of hard work but I’m extremely pleased with the results.

 

Assess

March 6th 2018, the day of the tournament.

Early in on Saturday, we arrived at seycove to prepare for our presentation in the afternoon.

 

Instant Challenge:

This was our first activity of the day and I believe that it went really well, because from what we know from our instant challenges that we did in class, our group isn’t great at improvising presentations on the spot but this instant challenge was a task challenge, which we are quite good at.

The Presentation:

As we began to set up on stage we were very nervous, but that’s expected, as our presentation began I knew it was going to be great.

And it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, we were confident with our lines and pretty much everything went smoothly and we even made the crowd laugh a few times.

In the end we went home with a first place ribbon!

 

How I felt afterwards 

Even though DI isn’t completely over yet and we have provincials in a couple of weeks, over all I feel extremely relieved and I’m very proud of my team. Our hard work really payed off and we really don’t have too many things to fix.

On Tuesday morning we got our raw scores presented to us in class, and I’m surprised that we all most got the maximum amount of points on each category.

 

After seeing what the judges had said about our performance we took time in class to create a list of goals to make our performance even better for pronvincials.

I’m looking forward to provincials and expect another post soon updating you on the results!