I helped build this in college recently. It was a few years ago but I'm proud of it. Here's me while we were building it.
Nowadays, I mostly build automated trading systems.
It's part of annual carnival at Carnegie Mellon. Its basically a community event in Pittsburgh where university organizations make elaborate Carnival Booths. There is a common theme for all booths and each booth includes a game. The Booths are meant to be education and geared towards children. Here is CMU's page on it: CMU Carnival I wasn't involved in this year but here is timelapse that shows the scale of the event.
Booth timelapse 2011
That time-lapse is cool. I feel like I've seen it before though, any chance you posted it a while back? Felt very familiar to me. Seems like a lot of hard work for something that is used for such a short time. Was it just one day of use? Are you able to re-use the same materials each year or is it a one shot deal?
It's actually two days and we do our best to reuse material year to year. That said its not the two days of use that drives most people it's more the experience and opportunity to build. Plus there's a competition among organizations. We did not win with the booth I posted (got second) but we did win the following year. I might have posted before but I don't know for sure. I use this site the same way I have conversations and trust me I tend to retell stories every once in awhile.
A good story is worth repeating. Sounds like a cool experience. What was the booth you built that took the #1 spot?
The theme was epic adventures. We did journey to the center of the earth. Here's me again at the top of the entrance. And here is a view of the front. (Saving an image from Flickr on my iPhone proved incredibly hard so you'll have to click for this one).