For EPro 8, there was a qualifying challenge where Riley McMorran, Luke Abercrombie, Lance Swaine and myself had to build a landmark then pop three balloons off it. We built Big Ben and created a mechanism that popped the balloons by twisting a crank handle. We also made our name The Donkeys. Our Big Ben was one of twelve entries that qualified for the EPro8 semifinals.

The semifinals were hosted at Cobham Intermediate.

There were four challenges that we could choose from: Paint the hall, Netball, Burglar alarm and one that we can’t remember. We decided to do the paint the hall challenge and we created a robot that painted. There were two sensors on the robot, and a motor made the robot move its arm up, then it touched the sensor and then started moving down and repeated this until we turned off the battery. 

We then added wheels to the robot and we were moving the wires around so it would paint up, paint down, then move forward. Unfortunately, the wires were not in the right places, and that made us miss the finals by TEN points. 

During most of the event, we were in either third or fourth place, but at the end, we got overtaken by the Humble Humans. We did beat Cobham and Heaton though!

By Isaac C (Hīrere)