RCL Blog 9: Ted Talk Outline

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TED Outline Format

Topic: E-Sports reaching mainstream levels of popularity

Purpose: Convince viewers of normality in viewing E-Sports and reasons for someone to pursue E-Sports

Thesis Statement:  E-Sports is an industry worth investing time into understanding because it is continuing to increase in popularity (even overtaking traditional sports), is increasing relevant financially and culturally.

Introduction

Attention Strategy:

Orienting Material: How will you begin this presentation in a way that appropriately garners audience attention?

The introduction will show a brief clip of a highlight from the Overwatch League Season 1 finals, and then I will explain the significance of it, and reveal to the audience that the play essentially got the winning team $1 million. Then, I will define E-Sports and transition to talk about E-Sports as a whole and approach the thesis statement.

https://twitter.com/espn/status/1023236836116848640?lang=en

Clip that will be used ^

Body

  1.                 Main Idea – E-Sports is growing in popularity
  2.             A personal example of me attending Overwatch Season 2 Finals w/ picture showing sheer number of people there, and describing the experience
  3.               E-Sports viewing is growing and projected to grow higher than most sports (graphs will be shown)

 Visual here is a chart of upward trending E-Sports viewership with projected viewership in future

  1.               Main Idea – Reasons people should pursue E-Sports through involvement or viewership
  2.               Lots of money can be made in the field as a participant

High salaries for professional players, coaches, casters, jobs in team infrastructure (social media relations), broadcasting, scholarships

  1.               Cultural relevance of viewing

As E-Sports continues to gain more traction, it will be more commonly discussed and shown. It is already broadcasted in some bars, and watching will allow people to discuss team strategies and such with others, similarly to how people do with traditional sports.

Visual here is graph of salaries and available jobs in field

III.             Main Idea – Comparison of traditional sports to E-Sports.

A  Comparison in the viewing of traditional sports and E-Sports

  1.         A common argument against watching E-Sports is “why would you watch someone else play video games.” Most viewers of traditional sports do not regularly play the sport (ex: football), and to be able to watch more skilled players perform at a higher level than you are capable of (the same reason people watch competitive sports)
  2.           League of Legends Championship 2019 had more unique viewers (100 million) than Super Bowl this year (98 million). Tickets to the event sold out in 4 hours. (CNBC).

Visual here is chart showing E-Sports projected to have more viewers than most other sports

  1. Comparison in competitivity
  1. Physical ability: For traditional sports, this corresponds to athletic ability and strength of individual players. For E-Sports, this corresponds to mechanical skill in game, resulting from the physical mouse and keyboard input by the player.
  2. Strategy: Both have strategical components ranging from practiced plays by teams, positioning of players in the sports field/in game, and generally a player knowing what they should do in a given situation.

 

Conclusion

Concluding Remark – Summarize main argument, and then talk about the increasing cultural relevance, such as through the potential for E-Sports as an Olympic event.

Passion Blog 5: Megaminx

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The megaminx is a 12 sided dodecahedron puzzle with pentagon sides. The pieces still follow a similar pattern to a standard 3×3, but it is not exactly the same. The biggest similarity is that the center pieces on the megaminx also do not rotate relative to each other, which allows for each face to be referenced by the color of the center. The megaminx also has corner and edge pieces on each face, but it has 5 of each while a standard 3×3 has 4 of each. Now that the fundamental similarities of the puzzle have been established, we will mix it up and go through solving it!

 

We start by picking a face and matching the edges of its color to it. For this, we will start with the silver side. Matching all the edges to the face results in a star pattern on the face, and each edge must be properly aligned with each center face as well so that the colors still match. This is the equivalent of solving the cross on a 3×3.

After solving the star, we must solve the next two layers: the corners on the top face and edges next to them. This, again, mirrors that of solving the middle layers on a 3×3 puzzle, as the process is exactly the same. When the first two layers are correctly solved, the puzzle should look like this:

Next, we solve all the faces adjacent to the first face that was chosen for the star. Essentially, we are making a solid color on all the sides that we partially solved in the previous step. The megaminx should look like, from both a top and down perspective.

At this point, the only unsolved faces are ones adjacent to the face opposite from the one that we initially solved the star on, and the opposite face itself. Since we started with the silver face, the black face is our opposite side. We fill in the middle layers, similarly to how we did in with pairing the edges with the corners in the second step. This leaves us with just the last layer to solve.

Now that we just have the last layer to solve, we start by creating a star on the face with the black center and aligning the edges with the centers adjacent to the face.

After creating the star, we make the top face a solid color by rotating the corners so the black color faces upward.

The last step to solve the megaminx is to move the corners to their corresponding positions. At this point, any color that is not aligned with any of the center pieces needs to be moved so that its colors match the surrounding pieces. Completing this step solves the puzzle.

Overall, solving the megaminx is fairly similar to the process for solving a standard 3×3, but some steps need to be repeated due to the larger number of sides. You solve the star and first two layers first, which is exactly the same process as the 3×3, Next, the next two middle layers need to be solved, following a process that is similar to solving the original middle two layers of the puzzle. After solving all the middle layers, it is just the last layer that needs to be solved, again like the 3×3. In the next blog entry, we will discuss two of my personal favorite puzzles, that are much quicker to solve: the 2×2 and the pyraminx.