The EPro8 Challenge is the inter-school science and engineering competition. Every year over 25,000 students from throughout New Zealand take part.

From the 26-27th of April, Broomfield School year 6,7 and 8s did a competition called the Epro8 Challenge.

We were put into teams of 6-7 people, there were 6 teams they were called Hehasz, Buckle My Shoe, Ratatouille, 6 Pro Flamingos, Shembulock and Lemon Squeezy. My team was Ratatouille and my team members were Madden, Maddison, Taylor T, Taylor M, Lachie and I.

We had a box of tools and materials, popsicle sticks, a certificate the size of an A4 piece of paper and the challenge booklet.

On the first day, we did a challenge called ‘Getting Started’ which taught us how to use the equipment. There were red connectors for a 90-degree angle, blue connectors for any other angles, pulleys, gears, cranks, wheels, three different-sized rods, axles, rope and screws. The next challenge was called ‘Royal Wave’, for this we had a live leaderboard and a red button that played a different song for each team.

On the second day, we got onto the official challenge. We had 3 options of things to build, there was a ‘Water Well’, 'Certificate Giver' and a ‘Dunk Tank'. We had two hours to do all of them! There were tasks to go with challenges, and they were each worth a certain amount of points, the highest amount of points given was 50.

My team did the ‘Certificate Giver’. We had to build a frame and make a contraption to give the certificate and a hand that could shake another person's hand.

The winning teams were the Hehasz and Buckle my shoe, both scoring 260 points.

Going to the next round to compete against other schools is the Year 8 girls from team Hehasz.

By Stella Roberts-Williams