On Saturday 5th August a group of Kaiapoi High School students competed against around 180 other high schools around the country in the New Zealand Engineering Science Competition.

The students were Daniel Bowles, Alex Burling, Finlay Mably and Jacob Harford. The challenge was to answer the question as best as possible with the question being “How many rocket launches from Mahia Peninsula would it take to establish a lunar colony?”. The team had from 10am till 6pm to answer the question and write a report up to 10 pages long.

“The competition was a good and challenging experience. It made us question everything and think about the best possible way to answer the question. The first half of the day was a little slow starting with research and we were still working out what the question was really asking and how to answer it. After we found a way to answer it, it was quite fun thinking of the different ways we could build the moon base.” - Daniel

“It really challenged us to think critically about what we were proposing and to innovate on those ideas. A large part of answering the question is justifying your answer, and we did that by taking examples of other structures in space and missions to the moon and applied them to our context.” - Alex