NZ Engineering Science Competition by Janine Hills

NZ Engineering Science Competition

The NZ Engineering Science Competition took place on Saturday the 1st of August.

We had one team of four students enter: Jasper Seddon, Linus Molteno, Liam Scaife, and Odin Jacobs. 

At 10am a question was released nationwide from the University of Auckland Engineering Department, and teams around the country got to work trying to find a solution. The questions for this competition are ambiguous and require the students to state assumptions they make along the way. By 6pm the reports (no larger than 10 pages long) are due in. This year's question was: How many satellites can be launched into orbit before astronomers on earth can no longer observe the night sky without interruption?

Our team submitted at 5:57pm after an emotional rollercoaster in the last 2 hours of the competition. Facing an unsolvable and complex problem brought out the creativity and resilience of our students, which was supported with their great sense of humour. Well done to these four competitors for their mammoth effort and unrelenting persistence to solve the unsolvable! The results of the competition will be released around November (I think we should all assume their report was the best one, until told otherwise). A copy of the report is available from the Mathematics Department upon request.