JTC I³ Challenge

The JTC I³ Challenge is a big inter-school, inter-disciplinary challenge organised by JTC, a competition with 10 other teams from various schools like RI, HCI, DHS, YJC, CJC, PJC and AJC. 

Here’s a description about the competition from the website

ReallyArchitecture will be working with JTC this march on an innovative competition to come up with ideas for new industrial environments. We are focusing more on integrated industrial enviornments (ie. industry with residential with commercial with recreational).

Another interesting bit is that we are pitching this as a high-level multi-disciplinary competition, where schools send in their best students to compete with other schools. You can bet that the students will be highly motivated and raring to go!

It is a 4-day intensive competition which lasted for almost 11 hours daily. We had to survey a landfill site and plan for its development to help Singapore progress socially, economically and environmentally.

The competition was mentally and physically exhausting, because not only we had to think through and brainstorm the various processes of planning plus occasional public presentations to distinguished guests (think - PW everyday, a total of four presentations), we also had to cope with the tight time-frame of mere minutes to prepare for each presentation. Because the schedule was very packed, we often had to work fast and even work over meals to achieve the best possible results because every presentation had marks awarded to each team.

Day One was about the introduction of the competition as well as some site visits to JTC and Fusionopolis/Biopolis.

Team ACJC!

The interior of Fusionopolis

Day Two was where the pace really started getting faster. In the morning, we visited the site (Lorong Halus) at Hougang. To get a better understanding of the residents’ needs, we had to survey those people living in the area and take photos of them for our first presentation. This gave us an understanding on what kind of facilities/infrastructure they wish to see on that site.

Cheng Hui interviewing a resident…

… and taking down notes

Briefing by our stand-in facilitator

Lynn overlooking the site

After surveying the site, we headed back to JTC to brainstorm on ideas we had.

Brainstorming in opportunities of the site

Write!

The energy-filled competitive scene in JTC

Presentations (one out the four)

Day 3 involved the continuation of idea generation as well as model making. In the morning, we had to do another presentation about our model and its facilities.

Lynn and Cheng Hui had to sit for an exam in the morning so it was only 3 of us working on the model with our facilitator Melisa.

Hi-5 after a job well done

Day 3 was the MOST TIRING day of the four days because we had to complete two 3D models - one showing the entire site (1:1000 scale) and the other showing an important developmental site (1:1000 scale). Moreover, we had to produce an A4 proposal of our development and 2 A1 boards worth of research and sketches to support our idea. All these will be used during the final presentation on day 4. Because of the limited time, many teams (including us) had to work overtime, i.e. stay back beyond the dismissal time of 6.30pm and working till late at night.

I think Lynn had just 1.5 hours of sleep?

Model making

Our initial macro model

Desert - muffins from Crystal jade (WE WERE WELL FED!)

Day Four was the final day of the competition where he had 2 hours of extra preparation time before our final presentation which it carries a weightage of 60% of our entire competition score.

Our final macro model

Some final thoughts:

The competition was a long, tiring and fun one. While it kind of wasted 4 precious days of my holidays, I really loved the spirit of our team and we bonded quite well during this competition. Our planning, teamwork, allocation of jobs, leadership, presentation, everything - really, went amazingly smoothly. We did not have disagreements, we worked well and fast under the given short time frame, persevered till the end of the 4 days (despite having other commitments during that period of time), stayed up late to research and work on the model to make it look wonderful.

The results will be released in 3 weeks. Even if we don’t win, I hope we can take the experience along with us to our future endeavors because I really learnt something new from the competition - and that is planning and teamwork really does wonders to the outcome.

I hope we win,

cause the best is (yet) to be.

:)