Mary Talbot
April 2, 2016
Skains leaving Tarpons for Cecilia
April 5, 2016
Students and educators from around the world will learn in late May about Bartholemew and the hip-hop stylings on his new instrument.
Bartholemew, looking for inspiration to create the beats his disapproving father would never allow, has a dream where he sees Mozart playing an innovative, new instrument. The music maker is a cube made out of balsa wood with stretch wrap, foil and a rubber band covering one of the object’s six sides, providing the music pioneer a percussive surface to write music.
Bartholemew is a character played by South Terrebonne High School junior Zoe Domangue in an elaborate skit she and six other South Terrebonne students came up with. The skit and the instrument are part of the structural challenge at the Destination Imagination competition, one of seven team challenges in the event. The South Terrebonne team won first place in the state, and they are now headed to the competition’s global finals in Knoxville, Tenn., this May.
Destination Imagination is an annual, international competition that challenges students to find creative solutions to problems. According to the program’s website, about 200,000 kids participate in the event every year. This year, South Terrebonne had three teams in the challenges, with Domangue and her teammates winning the state’s structural challenge, this year dubbed “Musical Mashup.”
Musical Mashup required teams to build a structure that both supports weight and is a musical instrument. The teams also had to come up with a skit to introduce the structure that involved one of the students playing a solo on the instrument. The South Terrebonne team, named Bananaphobia, blew away the Louisiana competition. Their structure, at only 66 grams of the 175-gram limit, was able to hold 810 pounds. According to the students, the closest team was able to hold 595 pounds.
Key to the cube’s successful design was the input from the two seniors on the team, Jordan Peltier and Caralynn Marcel. Peltier and Marcel had learned the value of support beams in their physics classes, so they added poles running through the middle of the cube’s sides.
“Nobody thought about putting the middle pole in to hold it up, because it’s that middle pole that’s sturdy,” Peltier said.
Bananaphobia members know their cube could have held more weight at the state level, as one of their test structures held 1,446 pounds. However, the state competitions only allow for one pull extender; at the global level, they can use two extenders. They feel with some tweaks, their structure could support nearly a ton.
The team in total is comprised of the two seniors, junior Domangue, and four freshmen – Samuel Roberts, Evan Stringer, Andrew Le and Brennan Price. Peltier recruited Marcel and Domangue to DI, while the four freshmen were already friends and decided to join during orientation. They learned of the challenge in August, and would meet multiple times a week to work on their designs. The skit itself went through five different scripts, with the younger part of the team taking the lead on the writing. According to Mark Boudreaux, a DI organizer at South Terrebonne, the students are independent in their creative process.
“When they do DI, everything is theirs. They get no help at all, in any way, shape or form, from anybody who is not on their team,” Boudreaux said.
Christohper Forsyth, the team manager for Bananaphobia, took on a supervisory role as the students worked throughout the year.
“If they have a skills question, I can answer, ‘Well, this is how you perform this skill,’ but I can’t actually provide it. Then I’ll go shopping for them if they need any supplies. And I make sure they keep on task and they leave with all their body parts intact,” Forsyth said.
If he were being scored on his job, Forsythe would have received partial credit for that last part of the rubric, as Marcel was found innovative ways to draw blood during the construction process.
“I cut my finger on everything but the sharp objects,” Marcel said.
Bananaphobia’s next step toward Knoxville goes beyond simply tweaking their cube’s design. They must also find a way to pay for the trip to global competition. According to Boudreaux, in previous years South Terrebonne’s DI program would sell pizza on Fridays to raise money. Because of new healthy school lunch initiatives this year, the team is not allowed to sell the pies. The cost for hotel rooms and the global competition comes out to about $725 per student.
The team is considering pancake and bake sales at school and sales at Sam’s Club as options to find the money. They are also considering starting a GoFundMe page to take in donations to make it to the global competition.
According to Peltier, the students come from different social groups, but once together, they found they had common interests. Marcel said the biggest disagreements during meetings were over what kind of instrument the structure would be. Though the journey was not always smooth sailing, each student has gotten something out of being on Bananaphobia. Le has a head start on physics after hearing Marcel and Peltier’s ideas for the cube’s design. Domangue has extracted a more personal value from the time spent with her teammates this year.
“I have friends now,” she said dryly.
Peltier, who is headed to the Air Force after graduation, has picked up skills that should help her in the future.
“I learned how to get along with people and open up; throw out ideas and think on my feet,” she said.
The South Terrebonne Destination Imagination team, Bananaphobia, are (top row, from left) Samuel Robert, Zoe Domangue, Brennan Price, Andrew Le, team manager Christopher Forsyth, (bottom, from left) Jordan Peltier, Caralynn Marcel and Evan Stringer.
