We had DI regionals about a month ago now, and as my schedule has it now is the time for a blog post. I could say I was giving myself time to reflect and gain a better rounded opinion, but really I’ve just been lazy and would have rather enjoyed the nice weather. ‘I’ll do this on a rainy day, not waste a nice day’, well the rain did not come.

We had a while to make our initial solution for regionals, starting our project right after winter break. Regionals was right before spring break on March second, so we had a little less than two months to get it done. You may be thinking that with one hour a day, we’d have so much time to work, but that is only partly true. You see, we had only until February first to work in class, because of the semester change, so any work from then on would be outside of school. 

So in the first class we found out what challenge we were doing and met our teams. This year was different from any before because we were put in teams with grade 9’s. My team consisted of

Liam 

Lucas

Maddie

Quin

Me

First impressions, yeah, pretty good. I think we were a well rounded team, with all weaknesses covered. 

We worked a while, didn’t get much done and ended the semester with a vague idea that we wanted our story to be based around back to the future, time travel of sorts. 

Over the next while we added a to the story, Maddie made a table, and I brought a few woodworks to add on top of the table. We came to the first dress rehearsal with a table, costumes, a few pieces of wood that fell over, and ourselves we did a solid three minute presentation, and celebrated because we learned one thing.

The only way is UP!

Team meetups were once a week, then twice a week, then none a week, and then every day for the last week and we had made a working solution, but working a minimum wage, not tips level of working. The only way for us to have a chance at regionals was to pull up our sleeves and act like actors often do. 

With a couple mix ups still unresolved we showed up on the morning of regionals. Well not everyone, Lucas wasn’t there and Liam took his time to get there, but the team showed up. Some rehearsals, Liam showing up and some changes to the machine and we were up to present. 

Pretty good huh? Well the judges thought so, because they gave us a gold for that! 

The reason we won had less to do with the performance, and more to do with the fact that we were the only team to read the rules well enough not to touch the ball when inside the playing stage, which was a taped box. Anyhoo, ‘twas done, and a good performance from the whole team.

If I did this post when I was supposed to, I would’ve written here what the plan was for provincials, but that was last weekend. Let me just pretend, and I’ll fill you in on what the plan would have been.

‘It’s march 10th, and last weekend was DI regionals. We probably should have met up this past week, but it is what it is, we have one week after spring break to make the story a bit more understandable, update the launch mechanism, and improve the ball path to better trigger the lights and sound. 

This was a good performance, and hopefully Provincials is even better!’

Well, we will see past Tommy, we will see…