Send Bomb Diggities to DI Globals!

The Bomb Diggities are a team of Austin high school girls who are working to raise $8,000 to pay their way to an international creative problem-solving competition in May. After winning at regional and state tournaments, the team is the first ever from the Austin Independent School District to earn a spot at Destination Imagination's Global Finals to be held May 23-26 in Knoxville, Tennessee.

The Bomb Diggities formed at Travis Heights Elementary nine years ago and have competed in the annual DI competition every year since. This was the team's first year to advance from the Capital Region tournament to the state tournament and then to qualify for Global Finals.

The Bomb Diggities is one of the few independent teams in the Capital Region (where 244 teams competed in February), receiving no support, financial or otherwise, from their schools or the district. They are now working to raise the $8,000 it will take for them to make it to Knoxville.

Team members are Lucy Williams and Lina Green, both of Garza Independence High School; Mimi Strauss, Mo Quinn, and Andrea Cañizares-Fernandez, all of LASA High School. Their team managers are parents Susan Williamson and Genevieve Sprinkle.

How Will We Spend the Money We Raise?

What's Destination Imagination All About?

The Bomb Diggities will compete with other teams in the "News to Me" improvisational theater challenge, one of seven difficult, open-ended DI challenges that require elementary- through college-aged students to work through the nine-month competition season on solving a problem by applying skills ranging from engineering and construction to improvisation, theater arts, communication, and teamwork. Team solutions must be team-generated; any outside ideas and suggestions are specifically forbidden, even from their team managers or parents. Teams present their solutions at competitions that culminate in the Global Finals.

Over the years, the team has done everything from build an electric-drill-powered vehicle out of a sawn-apart metal tricycle and an ironing board to concocting a performance that featured a singing-and-dancing boy band fronted by a hand-crafted three-headed alien puppet. They have learned to use power tools and to build structures out of ordinary materials like pipe cleaners, newspaper, and mailing labels. They won DI's highest honor, the Da Vinci Award, given for extraordinary creativity, by engineering a technical device "” built within a 30-minute time limit "” that used a team-fabricated propulsion system to generate both motion and sound and also contributed a crucial required element to their theatrical performance.

If you'd like to know more about Destination Imagination go to www.idodi.org/index.php/a-closer-look.

This year, 100,000 DI team members competed in tournaments throughout the U.S. and in 30 countries to earn a spot at the finals in May. The Bomb Diggities are among more than 8,000 students representing 1,200 teams that have advanced to Global Finals, which will be held at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.