EPro8 experience by Caelum, Marcus, Andrew and Archie on July the 28th 2022

What is EPro8 and What does Each Piece of Equipment do?

EPro8 is an engineering, innovating and problem-solving competition. We had a station to work with and to build what it says to build in the instruction booklet. The basic pieces are aluminium rods, which were used to structure and create the main building. Then, there were red and blue joiners, red joiners could connect two rods together as you can see in the picture later on. The blue joiners work a little differently; the blue joiners had a little space between them to fit the aluminium rods, similar to the red joiners. The only difference between them was the blue joiners could make the aluminium rods diagonal and at different angles. The blue joiners are on the left and the red joiners are on the right of the image. 

Now we should talk about the screws. Screws are used for immobilising the equipment. We can’t talk about the screws without the wingnuts. The wingnuts are used to hold the screws in place as the lack of wingnuts would cause the building to collapse and probably end up poking someone's eye. Wingnuts don't need to be twisted with two fingers, that is very inefficient and slow. What you could do instead (and what we did to save a lot of time in the competition) was to flick it repetitively. The force of the flick will send the wingnut speeding down the screw.

The Experience

Our experience with the competition

was great. Caelum’s grandpa drove us to Farm Cove Intermediate where the competition was held. When we got there we sat down on the benches nervously and looked around. There were lots of mats for each team and on the mats, there were stations for the teams to build with. On top of each station, there were names for every individual team. Our team name was Bucklands Beach 1, it sounded immensely boring. Then we looked over to the other team’s names. We froze with fear, our blood ran cold, our eyes widened and we shared a look to each other saying

“Good game, we lost.”

As we saw ‘The Brainiacs’, the ‘MBS Building Society’ and the most fearful one... ‘The Almighty Builders’. There was also Sunnyhills 1 and 2 which sounded equally as boring as Bucklands Beach 1 and 2 and Wakaaranga 1 and 2. As soon as we saw The Almighty Builders we trembled in fear. Caelum said,

“All they need to do is put down one piece, ONE ALUMINIUM BAR and they’re gonna destroy us. We are gonna be absolutely annihilated, we’ve lost…”

And so we tried our hardest when the time came to build. There were four things we could build: an alarm clock, a magic show, a vending machine, or a car that can paint lines on the road. So what did we choose? The vending machine because it had the most points at the start and also looked fairly easy compared to the others. We were confident that out of the 12 teams, 3 or more of them wouldn’t finish and get extra points. That was a horrible strategy but we weren’t going to win anyway with The Brainiacs, The MBS Building Society and the ALMIGHTY BUILDERS. So we just tried our hardest to build the vending machine.

We found a little cute plush bunny and put him on a big red button that would call the judge when we finished a step. We were getting our hopes up as we bowed down to the bunny and asked for its blessing.

We started off with a vertical cuboid that was made from four long aluminium rods and eight medium-sized rods. Then we attached those rods together with red joiners and we finished the cuboid. Then we got two aluminium rods and screwed them inwards from the cuboid. Next, we got one whiteboard to act as platforms for the vending machine. When we put the two aluminium rods there, it’s so that we could rest the boards on top. After that, we used eight red joiners, eight wingnuts and eight screws to bolt the board into the bars. This is a very important feature in EPro8: the red joiners and blue joiners have holes in them to stick the screws in. This feature is so that when you slide a bar in the red/blue joiner, you will be able to pop the screw in and stabilise the bar with a wingnut. Next, we got some gears and electronic equipment. We also got a spring and connected it with the gears. After that, we went to the judge and brought back three plastic bags from the judge. When we acquired the bags we filled each with twenty blue joiners. The reason was we didn’t have hard candy and that was a substitute for it. Once we did that Archie got some wires and built the next step which was to press a button that pushed one bag out. We did this by connecting wires from the button to a timer, the timer would determine how fast or slow the spring moved. There was lots of trial and error as we failed, again and again, to get the timing right, eventually, we were sure we did it. We tested it and when we pushed the button the vending machine gave us one bag of blue joiners. We had finished the 2nd step! We pushed the big red button and the judge came, he scanned a barcode and we were in first place with around 210 points! After a few minutes, we got stuck in the second to last step. We were running out of time and Wakaaranga 1 was in the lead. Then the time was up… we got second!!  However, Wakaaranga 1 won. “Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo” Luckily all the teams that had scary names all lost. We were fortunate to have come second and we were able to go to the semi-finals.