Amid the crowd and judges, the Pineapple Pirates raced across the stage putting the finishing touches on their miniature car. After hooking the tracks and obstacles, the team launched their car through the course.

The campus Destination Imagination (DI) team, the Pineapple Pirates, won the California Destination Imagination competition in the secondary division at Sacramento, April 5. The team of six juniors competed against DI teams across California and will compete in the Global Finals, May 21-24.

“DI is always a growing and learning process and it seems to be a little different for each person,” Ray Keys-Bramlett, team manager, said. “They (students) learn how to work together as a team and encourage each other to explore new ideas without the fear of being put down. They learn that they can do anything they put their minds to.”

The competition was divided into two parts, the instant challenge, where the team must complete a project without any prior preparation, and one of five challenges: engineering/technical (Obstacles of Course), theater arts/science (Hit or Myth), theater arts/fine arts (DI?ve Got a Secret), theater arts/improvisation (Chorific), and structural and architectural design (SWITCH!).

?Because our team is strongest in the building challenges, it was decided four to two that our team would solve problem A: Obstacles of Course,? Scott Thao, ’09, said. ?I specialize in extremely detailed artwork along with Janae (Keys-Bramlett). David (Sholes) is our creative thinker and problem-solver, Anythony (Johnson) is our ?Drama King? while Tonia (Keys-Bramlett) and Cody (King) are our technical engineers.?

Since the beginning of the year, the Pineapple Pirates have worked on their engineering/technical challenge, which consisted of building a car with a technical energy source that can overcome ten obstacles from a list of 12.

Despite placing second at the previous regional competition, the team still qualified for the state competition.

?After we finished second at regional, we all knew that to have the smallest chance at state, we would have to improve a lot,? Tonia said. ?For the next month, we spent many late nights at my house working on improving our car, track and play.?

The Pineapple Pirates continued to refine their project even until the day of the competition.

?Our entire team spent most of the previous night before the competition putting the final touches on our performance and we were not sure it would work,? Sholes said. ?But it did and much better than we hoped. We all preformed very well and everything was a success.?

During their performance, the Pineapple Pirates were also required to integrate a skit that emphasized the concept of overcoming obstacles. The team based their skit off the book, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerto.

In addition to winning their division, the DI team received the Renaissance Award for their instant challenge score of 98.5 out of 100 points.

?At the awards ceremony we were all sitting down and waiting for everyone to know what they had won,? Johnson said. ?When they announced Fresno Christian, the Pineapple Pirates, I had never been so happy to win something really cool.?

With their victory, the Pineapple Pirates qualify to compete at the Global Finals at the University of Tennessee, May 21-24. This will be the second campus DI team to compete at the Global Finals since the late 90s.