Engineer, Problem Solve, Innovate

EPro8 is a Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths (STEM) competition held across New Zealand. There are multiple heats of 12 teams with the top 3 teams going through to a semi-final, and then final. The children have a variety of different challenges to choose from and complete. In each challenge there are different aspects which build on one another. Each part of the challenge is worth a certain number of points depending on its complexity. The children need to work collaboratively to work through the challenges, building structures, creating pully systems, automating different parts of their challenge. We entered two year 7 and 8 teams and two year 5 and 6 teams of 4 children into this years competition as part of our extension programme. One of our year 7 and 8 teams narrowly missed out on getting through to the semi-final coming 4th by a very narrow margin. The other teams all completed multiple tasks and worked really well together.