When It Was Our Time To Shine

Our journey for all the preparation was both fun and stressful. Those two don’t usually come together but this time it did. Most of the stressful part was during the preparation. The games were decided to be outdoors. There were a bunch of stations, each with a different task to complete. The decision for the winning group was simple: the one that finished all the tasks with the shortest time.

There were four stations. Most of the stations involved puzzles in relation to geometry. One game involved card matching wherein the players match the type of triangle to its appropriate name. I think the highlight was the “Eggzoited much” station where the teams needed to relay a raw egg before they solve the area of the triangle they are standing on. All the teams completed their mission and nobody got disqualified for cracking the egg. As for our team, we finished one task down, and it was time to prepare for the other two: debate and presentation.

The debate part was relatively easy. We decided on the motion and prepared for our speeches individually according to the position assigned to us. We contemplated for some time and came up with the decision that we wanted to argue about whether the shortest distance between two points is always a straight line. At first it we thought it was pretty silly for a motion but we realized it is debatable and it was going to be a technical one. I was assigned to be the prime minister so I set the parameters and standards of the debate. I presented the main arguments of my house and opened the ground for battle. The government side mostly defended the Euclidean geometry while the opposition stood for the non-Euclidean. According to the tally of votes, the government side won and it might be safe to say that the audience believed it was always a straight line that connected two points the shortest. Although in my opinion, the opposition side should have won because they had clearer arguments and firmer stand.

The preparation for the presentation was the most stressful part. We couldn’t quite decide whether to go live or make a video. We already had a story line a week before and we decided it would be musical for a change. But we encountered a lot of difficulties and most of it involved time. We wanted to keep it simple so as to avoid the stress brought about by editing. We ended up doing a video anyway and I was both the narrator and the cameraman. It was a story about a girl who hated math because of her failures. But with the help of some songs and her sister, she found herself eventually loving math. We finished it with a live final song and it was good.