SLO Speed Ahead: Cal Poly Finalizes Jungle Float for Pasadena’s Rose Parade
PASADENA, Calif. (KEYT) — Creative chaos, construction, and collaboration have made the Cal Poly team an unstoppable force.
“It's really cool to see how we all can come together from two different campuses to build a float like this. It’s pretty incredible,” said Cal Poly Flower Fields Manager Afton Phillips.
It’s the only student-designed and student-built float in the Rose Parade.
The magic is in the details and the story.
A story that revolves around this year’s theme— “The Magic in Teamwork.”
The Cal Poly float is named “Jungle Jumpstart”
“This is where the story's starting. So our robot is sitting here on the ground in the forest, and this lemur is going to start the spark that will light it up,” said Cal Poly Float President Aubrey Goings.
Students say the float shows the relationship between nature and technology through the story of a rainforest community coming together to restore its robot friend that had broken down.
The animals include a frog, monkey, jaguar, lemurs, and a toucan.
“We have some monstera, some ginger, some heliconias. There's lots of things that you find in the jungle. We're really trying to immerse everyone into the atmosphere,” said Goings.
It's an undertaking that takes thousands of hours with plant experts, mechanical engineers and everything in between.
Students and volunteers helped create the design and construct the mechanical elements.
“This year we actually have, a frog opening and closing a panel. Well, it's closing the panel. The panel opens back up on its own, and it's two, two different mechanisms interacting, in a very unique way that we had to, like, coordinate a collision zone and everything,” said Cal Poly Slo Construction Chair Ryan Newton.
Thursday’s Tournament of Roses will mark 137 years of the annual tradition.
