DI has always been an…experience to say the least. But whether its a positive or negative one, I always make sure to have fun in the progress of practicing, and learning how to perform. We started off things a little bit different than last year. Last year we were put in groups asked on what category we wanted to compete in. This year we were more focused on the compatibility of the people, more that the category. We took a survey, and each person put together their dream team. The teachers then took this into account, and created teams. From there we decided on a category as a team. This year, our team had decided to go with Improv, which I did last year.

If you would like to read/learn about Improv: To the Rescue click here.

*Scroll down to the Improvisational section.*

Competencies being assessed: Research & Understand.

This competency is our main one that is being assessed and it revolves around the question:

How might I research and understand a problem, process, or challenge, using different perspectives?

Last year, Improv won Regionals and Provincials (Instant Challenge too!), so the expectations for 2020 were big. Everyone in our group had actually had acting experience from their childhood which was lucky! We eagerly got to work on our milestones. Our Basecamp appeared empty at first glance, but after Regionals, oh boy…

Milestone 1: Identifying Challenge-defined requirements

This milestone allowed us to meet and understand all requirements outlined in our challenge document.

We created a folder labeled “Stage 1: Recognize” and add all challenge requirements to this folder. Improv requirements included identifying the restrictions along the skit/story, the villains superpower, the hero’s underwhelming power, the conundrum, and the sound effects. I feel I could’ve done more research on this particularly because I wanted to understand all our restrictions, and what rules we can use to our advantage, and I didn’t do that as much as I liked. For upcoming provincials, I’d like to dive deeper into our challenge and learn about what we can do with the time and resources we are provided with.

Milestone 2: Defining Team Deliverables

Now that we understood our challenge relatively well, it was now time to actually deliver on our requirements. We completed a form for planning and a form for each element of the challenge.

I think as a team, we were just getting started and had high expectations of ourselves, so we promised unreasonable things that we could not follow through on. For provincials, I think we should pick and write things that we know we will achieve and know our strengths and weaknesses as a team better.

Milestone 3: Team Roles & Responsibilities

This milestone required us to get a manager for each element. We learnt better throughout this process, that a leader or manager of one element doesn’t mean that they get to boss everyone around regarding that area. They have to keep this element and its progress on track, and make sure that, themselves included, are doing their part to help keep this element up to date and functioning until regionals. We put everyone in charge of one element, which was a good decision in my opinion. One person wasn’t running around trying to get 3 elements done, everyone was spread out over our elements. This task also helped us bond as a team, and we learnt not to be afraid to ask one another for help or to give them critique correctly when they worked on something regarding that element.

Milestone 4: Milestones and Task Sequencing

This milestone was our last to complete before the tournament, and this was all about catching up on work, milestones, and research that our team hadn’t completed. We had completed all the milestones up until this point and even though we are Improv, we tried to create a task sequencing list that consisted off something other than practicing. I think the closer we got to regionals, the more we realized that there were a lot of things that we didn’t think we had to do, like knowing our villain powers by heart, practicing how to lineup sound effects, giving cues for sound effects and much more.

Burn down chart!

Preparing for the Tournament: A week before

Of course, between these milestones we practiced our skits and one of the first things we did was compile a folder consisting of all the villain powers which we were asked to throughly research. I wouldn’t use the word throughly when looking back at what we wrote in this folder, but I still think we accomplished at this task. I’d like to extended on the research and understand aspect of this element because its one of our most important parts of the skit.

Reflection on the Tournament

After the tournament had ended we did a quick reflection piece, especially focusing on self-assessing ourselves on the Research and Understand Competency, a pie chart showing how much we feel we contributed to the process and our next steps we are going to take to improve for provincials. We also added a grade on what we think we deserve on this process.

Thats all I have for today! Thanks for reading my post on Di Regionals!

~Malaika