April 2015 – DesignBin Studios

Hi! We’re the Tongue-Twisting Turquoise Toucans! We’re so excited, and honored, to go to Global Finals again this year.

This year’s Technical Challenge is very difficult… and well… challenging. It is a fun challenge to tackle, and took a lot of work!

But, it was all worth it… Out of 68 teams that participated in the Destination Imagination State Tournament, we are honored to be one of the 17 teams representing Oregon at the 2015 Global Finals!

Along the way, we also won special Renaissance Award, in recognition of engineering design.

However, our team needs to raise $8,600 soon to compete 20150308_082507crop in this amazing international academic tournament. Every penny donated can help us reach our goal! This cost will cover our registration fees, air transportation and transfers, shipping costs, and on-campus housing and meals.

Destination Imagination… is an amazing program that prepares kids for future careers by teaching them the creative process, project management, teamwork, and critical thinking using STEM {Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics}.

Teams must only use ideas their team originated and must implement these ideas themselves. For instance, we can ask someone to teach us to solder or sew or rebuild a circuit board, but if we want to use it in our solution, we have to do the work ourselves.

Our team competed in the Technical Challenge – Creature Feature: we imagined, designed and built a world, a creature that did specific creature actions and a story of adventure.

In our story, Mr. DeMarcus’ submarines are disappearing off of the radar. He hires a team to construct CUB, an ROV submarine, to rescue the subs. While CUB is retrieving the missing subs, it is attacked, however, the team manages to get CUB back to the surface proving that teamwork is the best way to solve any crisis.

We also created a background scene change which applies the laws of physics and a control panel designed using recycled parts, a parallel circuit and magnetism. We also made an awesome antenna for the control panel, powered by a part from an old printer. We DI kids love to reuse things in creative and innovative ways!

We incorporated a puppet show that allows the audience to see what the engineers in the lab are seeing on their laptop monitor: CUB’s video of its deep sea dive and the creatures it encounters while rescuing the missing subs. The puppets were hand sewn and created to look like actual deep sea creatures we researched. We even made our own patterns for the creatures!