(piano music)

[Female Narrator] 40 finalists

20 winners, $100,000 to drop out

of school and pursue our dreams.

This is Teen Technorati.

Hi, my name is Lucy Guo and today

my fate's gonna be decided by Legos.

The finalists got an hour and 45 minutes

to build a Lego bridge the span of the table.

The first rule is there's not many rules at all.

We wanted to see how they would work as a team.

You guys have until four o'clock, go for it.

The question going through every finalist's mind

at that point was what exactly are we

supposed to build in this bridge.

My suggestion for this one is to have

the structural integrity going downward to a point.

[Ishaan] We know that there's going to be

some winner picked for the most creative

or most innovative bridge.

Put these rows almost next to each other

just like this, then we can actually bend and turn.

It's very exciting for these kids to meet each other

for the first time, sometimes they live in towns

where they're the only person who's technically savvy

and working on some obscure technology.

And now here's a room full of 40 people

who are just like them so it's fun to see them interact.

Imagine this spanning the length of

spanning the length of it and then

this slides down like that.

Let's just say there's two countries

that actually drive on different sides of the road

so while they're driving across this bridge

across the border they then switch

so they can actually continue to drive right

into the other country you know cross-border transportation.

I've gotten to know Darby pretty well.

She's really cool.

Build two posts then you slide the other one

through the two squares and it sits.

Well I'm actually competing for the title

of Miss Tennessee this June

so I may be the first TL Fellow ever

to compete in a beauty contest (laughing).

I'm working on a product called Bambina

and I'm tracking vital signs in babies.

Two years ago my very close family friends

lost a son to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

I decided I would use my ability

to streamline knowledge and topics together

to build a product.

I think I'm impressed by everyone

but right now, Catherine Ray is absolutely amazing.

Probably the smartest person I've ever met.

I started working on my current project

when I noticed how difficult it was

for my grandfather to get up and out of his chair

and sit back down, so I created Priiime

a triple phase wheelchair which is modular

so that every person can customize

the wheelchair to their specific personal needs.

We're going to use a well-known truss structure

to actually make it structurally sound.

(pop music)

It's essential for a scientist to foster

their creative side because innovation

comes from looking at things in ways that no one else does.

Can we do that?

If we do it's just like hexagonal

like down here, just hexagons and then have

one straight across the hexagons.

Yeah I don't actually know what you guys

are talking about.

What do you mean the base would be a hexagon?

You could go with that, you could go with that.

I just really like hexagonal structures.

In looking for TL fellows we do focus on

people who have unconventional ideas

and those types of people tend to be contrarian.

Sometimes that presents a challenge

actually working with people because

they're contrarians in all aspects of their lives.

Instead of making like extremely multi-tiered ones

I'm talking about just like a three-tiered one.

No but how does that connect?

Any time I saw an interesting interaction

between anyone I you know made a mental note

and in deliberations those were discussed.

I suspect we're actually being judged

for how well we get along and possibly

our creative problem-solving skills.

But that was on the back of my mind.

I just thought cool, Legos.

I'm 100% a leader and that's not even a question.

I make people feel like there's so much more out there.

And they can become their own leaders

just by following me for just a little bit.

Towards the end a leader emerges

in the successful teams and in the unsuccessful teams

everybody's still running around

and then you run out of time.

So we're gonna-- Can we not do higher ones?

(babbling)

So look at this.

I'm not sure, I mean I think we're building two bridges.

I think ours was the latter case.

The five of us were running in five different directions

trying to build stuff, I would build a base

and somebody else would build a buttress

and we'd have no way of connecting them.

To be honest it was kind of a mess.

When you have a team, if you design something

too intricate you'll never get it done in time.

We have 18 minutes guys.

(yelling)

So we're gonna start with table number one.

All the bridges blew our minds.

It's extremely sturdy.

We kind of built a rocket

and then build a bridge around it.

We filled up 10 glasses of water

and look it's still holding.

This is a mechanically sound drawbridge

made out of Legos.

Nice!

We've based it around the beautiful geometry

that is minimalistic of hexagons.

Our bridge is called DNA, kind of

a meta solution to international travel.

(applause)

The Lego challenge was really fun

we actually won so yay we got a little Lego set

as a prize, I gave it to my roommate

'cause she's never played with Legos before.

We did not win but we were able

to build something that I thought was pretty good.

[Lucy] But the Lego challenge was just a warmup

for the weekend's main event.

The lightning round, so be sure to subscribe

to the Wired channel for the next episode

as my fellow Teen Technoratis and I

face our biggest challenge, stage fright.

(electronic zinger)