🧬Destination Imagination Regional Tournament part.2🧬

   Hey guys I’m back with part two of my DI reflection. So if you’ve read part one to this long rant then you know the basis of what the whole series is. If you haven’t, I’d highly suggest going back and reading the first post. Anyhow let’s dive right back in where I left off!

  The next steps in producing our solution were the creation of the storyline, symptomatic, and team choice elements. Also just realizing that i have yet to mention the team choice elements. Basically the TCE’s are two elements of our presentation that are worth up to thirty points each. We needed to be creative and original with our elements so that we could reach the most amount of points. Anyway, carrying on. We assigned a teammate to an individual portion of the solution based off of their personal abilities. Myself loving literature and writing creative stories took control of the storyline and script. I was basically in charge of writing the story and transforming it into a script for myself and the three other characters to read off of. As the days turned into weeks and so on, our solution grew from rocky and small minded, to a huge canvas filled with ample opportunity. Along with the canvas came our team. I have been observing m team dynamic since day one and I have seen it grow so much. We have so many ways of communicating with one another, so many ways of giving open suggestions, and ways of assigning each other tasks without any conflict about who is doing the most. I am so happy to have seen my team grow as a whole and continue growing even after the lower mainland regional tournament!

  The regional tournament. Exciting. Exhausting. Exhilarating. Just a few ways of describing my feelings during the final moments before our presentation. The regional tournament is one of three tournaments that take place annually. After regionals come provencials, and if you qualify in the top two at provincials you have the opportunity to go to globals. It’s amazing to think that all over the world, people my age, younger, and older are competing for the same goal. It’s really amazing! Last Saturday was the British Columbia Lower Mainland Regional Tournament hosted by Seycove Secondary School and it was awesome. My school, the one I see roughly 194 days of the year was filled to what felt like maximum capacity with students of all ages from a ton of different schools all piling up in the holding rooms for each challenge. It was insane. As my team prepared for our presentation we could feel the time pressure closing in on us as we came from hours to minutes away from our performance. We entered the audience filled room in which we would present to see our peers, parents, and teachers all cheering us on. The adrenaline rush mixed with insane butterflies was like mixing oil and water, IT DOES NOT MIX! Anyhow, once we got out there, set up, and started performing I felt way more comfortable despite the audience and appraisers watching our every move. Once we finished we had the appraisers ask us questions about our presentation and all the little parts. I basically just going to cover what we did to obtain a full and awesome challenge solution.

 The first step in our goal was choosing a team name. After at least a week of debate we decided on “Humerus” for reasons that will make sense in a minute. The next steps towards success were deciding on our disease and doing all the research necessary. We chose a mental disorder caused by severe brain damage such as aneurysms, hemorrhages, strokes, and seizures located in the brain’s frontal lobe. The disorder causes a drastic change in behaviour resulting in extreme aggression, becoming irritable, lower levels of patience, childish attitude, and the most definitive, thinking you are the absolute funniest person on earth whilst making bad jokes, puns, and riddles. Let’s not forget the telling of not so funny stories at inappropriate times. The disorder, Witzelsucht, was discovered in Germany and is a family new but rare disorder. The next steps were writing the script and making our symptomatic. As previously mentioned,  I wrote the entire script and directed the skit. While I was busy with that my teammate Finn built the symptomatic and programmed a computer to diagnose our patient with voice activation and lighting. Angelo coded a heart monitor and used his newfound knowledge of how these machines work to make it super realistic, something the appraisers loved. We had a soundtrack made by Rhiann and a backdrop built by Kira. We built props to enhance our scene and rehearsed several times. Finally we felt prepared for regionals which doesn’t help my case of anxiety that happens to have taken place less than ten seconds before we presented!

https://youtu.be/qwSaxJvvh5o

 The final portion that went into our raw scores was the instant challenge. What? Ya its sounds confusing when you’ve just read two posts about the long and painful two months of preparation for the challenge. The instant challenge is a mini event that contributes to our final score. A part of DI is he privacy and confidentiality agreement. All participants had to sign a form swearing us to secrecy with everything instant challenge related. I can not talk about the actual experience but I can reflect on the experience with myself. Our IC performance really opened my eyes to how much room for improvement there really is. Whe we did practice IC’s my group would tend to be on the better end of things but once I saw the scores I understood that we really need to step up our teamwork and communication skills in high pressure situations. I know that sounds super cliche but it’s true. I bet that if we’d scored higher in the IC we could’ve done better overall. Moving on!

 

  Finally, the time had come. Hours after my presentation, the awards ceremony started. Once again it had been hours so I had been pondering the thoughts of what could happen during the ceremony over many games of Uno with my peers. Once the time had come, the appraisers had made their decision. “Second place goes to, Seycove Secondary’s Humerus!” It took about three seconds for it to sink in. As soon as I had realized that we had placed (which I did not expect) myself and my group mates all jumped up and bounced our way to the front to receive our ribbons. I was sort of dazed at that point and I couldn’t keep a straight head because of the overwhelming shock. I’m not afraid to say it, we deserved that second place. We did so well and I am so proud and excited for provincials. Although there is always room for improvement and to quote my teachers, “It’s the first attempt at learning,” I think that this was the best first attempt I’ve had all year.

See you guys after provincials

        Ciara ✌️

Ciara

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