DI continued

While Firstborn tends to concentrate more on the technical end of his challenges, Lastborn is definitely the drama type. This year, their challenge was Twisted History. They were supposed to create a performance where they took an event in history and changed a fact or changed the whole thing around. Within they presentation, they had to create a magical object that included shapes as part of it's design.

They chose to tell the story of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, but change it to aliens landing on earth and meeting Neil Armstrong. But because Neil was played by a girl, the name was changed to Neila.

Lastborn of course was an alien. But not just any alien. A 6-armed alien, with blue hair. We had fun adding sleeves to a shirt, stuffing them with stuffing and adding stuffed rubber gloves to the ends for hand.

The team waits with their props in the hallway. Neila Armstrong was a farmer, you know.
The three aliens argue over who will drive the space ship.

The girl-alien, Dudette, talks to Neila Armstrong. The girl in black is the narrator. Lastborn and the other alien are fixing the spaceship that they crashed to earth because they decided to all drive it together.
the whole cast assembles for to get their medals at the end of the performance. The adults in red are the appraisers.

This team did much better at their instant challenge. They worked as a team, but of course Lastborn stuck a couple of potty mouth words into the presentation. Sigh.

Overall the day was interesting. The level of competition in this region was much higher than at the region in MA that we competed in. These kids work all year on their props, and their acting so that they can give really professional presentations.

Firstborn and I watched the High School kids perform in the Obstacles challenge and in the structure challenge (that's the one he did last year). We were very proud of the fact that the HS team in Obstacles no only used the same type of car as Firstborn did (wired remote control), but were unable to overcome their obstacles in part because they had no steering. Their solution to getting through a tunnel when on a wired remote was also the same solution that Firstborn had come up with (cut a channel in the roof of the tunnel). Firstborn decided not to use that solution because we feared it would no longer be considered a tunnel.

Watching the structure performance was amazing though. This team built a structure that maxed out the test weights. They had to test it by putting weights on it while it was oriented in one direction and then again after orienting it in a different direction. (That seemed too hard to me which is why we didn't do that challenge this year). Not only that, but their skit was very creative and tied into the testing of the structure perfectly. They did things like using paper bags as masks. The first masked character was a robot; a bag painted with silver spray paint and then decorated as a robot face. Then next interesting mask was a pirate. A bag with a skull and cross bones, but stapled to the side of the bag was a second smaller bag decorated with a parrot. The second bag was positioned to look like it was sitting on the wearer's shoulders.

All of their props were well constructed and simple. Very low-budget but professional looking.

We then watched one of the top rated middle school teams in the area. They routinely go on to the Global Finals tournaments. They spend hours a week for months before each competition. The kids know how to sew their own costumes, build really intricate sets and write awesome scripts. They are very serious. And it showed. It was so amazing.

In some ways, it was disappointing though. The focus here is on winning. It is very serious competition. You can tell the teams who are fairly new to this. They look like they are in the wrong place. Like us, they tend to let the kids showcase what they already know instead of spending the year teaching them lots of new skills and letting them showcase those new skills. Some of us feel that this is a competition but also an after school activity, not a career training in itself.

The other sign of the seriousness of the competition was that few of the judges wore funny hats. It's a hallmark of DI for the judges to wear funny hats. For one it is in respect to the kids who work so hard to solve these problems and be creative. For another reason, it helps to calm the kids when they are being judged by someone who wears a funny hat. Without the hats, the feeling was less festive. There was a huge feeling of "I can't wait until this is over" instead of celebration. I will be making noise in our region about this omission.

At the end of the day, our building did surprisingly well. While we all started in mid to late November while the rest of the region started in September, we still had three teams place. One third, one second and one first place. The first place team will be going on to the state tournament next month and I think Firstborn and I will join them. I'm interested in seeing if State is as competitive as our region and if the rubricks for interferance are at about the same level. I think it will be excellent for Firstborn to see how the best of the best of Ohio solve these problems.