HOLLIS – The Hollis Brookline High School Destination Imagination team’s ability to think quickly on their feet was tested at the Instant Challenge portion of the global finals in May, and they solved the challenge without a flaw, placing first among all of the teams at their level of competition in the instant and team challenges.

Destination Imagination is a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering students’ curiosity, confidence and creativity through open-ended science, technology, engineering and mathematics, fine arts, and learning challenges.

This year’s global finals in Knoxville, Tenn., was a record-setting event for Destination Imagination, with 1,468 teams from across the U.S. and around the world taking on challenges that tested their creative, critical and collaborative thinking.

Among the international participants were teams from China, Korea, Guatemala, Canada, Mexico, Poland, England, Qatar, Jordan and Turkey.

Throughout the four-day event, teams at the elementary, middle, secondary and university levels competed in team challenges and instant challenges to determine their final standings. The competition and program is sponsored by NASA, Disney, National Geographic, Mayo Clinic, IBM, Oracle Academy, 3M, Pearson and Motorola Solutions Foundations.

Hollis Brookline has had a strong program for more than a decade, sending at least one team to the global finals each year. This year, three teams from Hollis Brookline were awarded the opportunity to participate and two teams attended as part of a 41-team delegation from New Hampshire.

The middle school team placed 19th in its challenge and level. The secondary-level team won the world title of top creative problem solvers for the team challenge and the instant challenge.

Simren Bhogal, Kyle Swanson, Amit Eshed and Davin Jimeno and Trai Jimeno worked for eight months on their solution to this year’s technical challenge, “Creature Feature.” The challenge require the team to build a creature that performed three actions using innovative technical methods. The creature was a character in a story of adventure performed by team members.

Another requirement was to visually depict an environment for the story that included at least two technical features. The team’s budget was only $175.

The team’s endless motivation and the ability to pursue a risky and innovative solution paid off. The group created a robotic creature, made of 1,000 parts, that walked, stretched its neck and communicated using eye expressions.

The creature, fondly called “Louis,” hatched from a 5-foot-tall, Faberge-inspired golden egg and was the main character in the team’s adventure story, telling the tale of an adopted Giraleon who embarked on a journey to find its birth parents. While traveling, the creature encountered physical, cognitive and emotional challenges, only to find out that family is first and foremost a place where you feel loved.

In addition, the team constructed a 6-foot-tall owl and a mechanical portal.

The team won for its overall integrated innovative solution and presentation. Second, third and fourth places were awarded to teams from Texas.

In the Instant Challenge portion of the competition, the team had six minutes to solve five successive tasks using limited materials.

For Eshed, Swanson and Bhogal, this was not a first podium experience at the global finals. In 2014, they were part of a team that won third place for solving the technical challenge “Dig In.”

Davin and Trai Jimeno joined the team this year for an amazing global finals experience, replacing graduated seniors Mandy Graves, who’s attending the University of New Hampshire, and Noam Eshed, who’s attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The team members said they couldn’t have done as well without the support of the community, especially those who donated to cover the team’s registration costs, and Elbit Systems of America, its corporate sponsor.