DI provincials…. a time where you can reflect on mistakes from regionals and improve your performance for provincials.

To start off, provincials takes place after regionals. All of the teams at Seycove qualified for provincials. After provincials, you can qualify and go to globals. Regionals was located at Seycove, which was very handy. Check out my regional post to read about my experience with DI at Seycove. Provincials however, was located at a high school in Surrey. It was around a 40 min drive, so there was no running home if we forgot anything. We had to fully check that we had all of our equipment. The other challenge was persuading a parent to drive our team to Surrey for 8:00am!

Preparing for Provincials:

After regionals we had a lot of work to do. Also in my past post I reflect on our performance, and there were a couple things to work on. We had a few weeks to rethink some elements. As a team we thought of some goals to set for provincials. Coincidentally, spring break occurred right after regionals, so we had all spring break to work on DI (yay…). A huge element we needed to improve was the rover. At regionals let’s just say there were a few issues with the rover! We made a goal that we would work on it during spring break. Surprisingly this actually happened, Calum and Sam were in charge of re-designing the rover. The rover was completely re-done from scratch.

The re-designed rover:

Another goal we set was to re-think the prop transformation. At regionals, the prop transformation wasn’t too impressive. It was basically a papier-mâché ball with lights that turned on. Over the break Spencer and I were in charge of the prop transformation.

We liked the idea of it being a bomb exploding. However, we needed to re-think how we were going to make this happen. Something that sparked an idea was to use a balloon. Balloons pop very easily and would make a loud BANG when it pops. The only thing was once the balloon popped, it would have to transform into something else. We concluded to fit a balloon inside a ballon so when you pop the outer balloon, there is a smaller balloon left. Before spring break, I ordered some LED lights off Amazon, because anything we did we wanted it to involve lights.

When they arrived, I realized that it could be a challenge to get the light inside the balloon (it was). First of all I couldn’t fit it inside a balloon so that stumped the idea for now. To test out other options I made a papier-mâché bomb and pocked holes through it so when the light was inside, the light would shine through the bomb.

However, we didn’t end up using this idea, mainly because we really liked the idea of the balloon. We re-thought it and figured if we took the casing off the light, it would be small enough to fit inside the balloon. After a lot of bursting balloons, Spencer and I managed to fit the light inside the balloon. We also added tissue paper inside the balloon to add more of a exploding effect.

Having a balloon as a prop was pretty annoying because it kept popping! There were many trips to the Dollar Store to get balloons!

Another element we had to re-think for provincials was our team choice elements. Kate and Isobel worked on this aspect. For regionals, our team choice elements was music and a French speaking character. We didn’t get many points at all for these. Something our whole team has in common is athleticism. Almost all of us played for the school basketball team and we are all very active. We decided to include basketball into our script. Calum is very dedicated to basketball and we thought we could incorporate basketball into his character. During the performance Calum showed his passion for basketball by dribbling  the ball and showing off some moves!

For the other team choice element, we kept the same idea with playing music. However, instead of it being a recording, we thought a live performance would get us more points and it did!!

The day of DI Provincials 2018…

So the day started off with a 6:30am start to get to Surrey!

When we got to the school, we realized we didn’t have the forms. Basically your team has to fill out forms that include our ideas and team choice elements. The appraisers look at them and they can give you points. This event definitely woke me up because we didn’t have a printer to print out the forms! We saw that there was a Staples with around a 20min walk. Thankfully Mimi’s mum was happy to drive us so we could print off the forms. We also weren’t the only group that forgot forms, so we ended printing off other teams forms. (Overall Staples literally  saved our lives!)

Once we had our forms we were good to go! We did a few dress rehearsals and we were ready to perform!

Our challenge went pretty well! The prop transformation worked really well, and the rover definitely worked better than last time. Only at the end did the rover stop working, but at least it made it through the maze!

Check out our performance!

We got some really good comments from the appraisers!

As you can see from the comments, the appraisers really liked bomb explosion and the rover!  I was a little surprised with our raw scores. In some elements we got a lower score than provincials. I thought we did a lot better. For example we got lower points on our rover even though it worked and completed the maze. However, it’s not entirely all about the raw scores. I am  proud of our team and our effort we put into the performance. Like I said earlier I was very happy we came 1st!

Our hard work payed off and our team SIICK came in first place!!! We also got first in the instant challenge! For the instant challenge our team have to build a tower using 30 forks. Our team worked really well together and we created the tallest tower!

Overall DI was a fun but stressful time. Our challenge definitely wasn’t easy and I think our team worked well together and we managed to produced good quality work for provincials. Regionals wasn’t the best however, it was a good learning experience. From DI I learned how important it is to communicate with your group and to set goals for the team with dead lines. I think the biggest element  our group fell on was time management!

So why do we do DI?

Believe it or not, DI has been scientifically proven that it “Students who participate in DI become better at creative and critical thinking, collaboration and idea generation”.

From having experience with DI, I have noticed that I am definitely better at solving challenges and problems in a creative way. The instant challenges is a good example. When you have to come up with a creative yet possible solution in a short period of time. Also in the study it said DI participants are more self-confident and tenacious. I agree with this because it’s practicing performing infront of a vast audience. This is definitely a skills I used to struggle with. I always hated performing infront of people, but I think DI has helped me overcome that aspect.