Alongside the success of the Year 5/6 team, a Year 7/8 team - The Tesla's have also won their local competition.

Team members Reuben Hayes, Cassie Cameron, Callum Beattie and Fienny Gamble have beaten out the competition at Motueka South School in the engineering challenge that is Epro 8.  The second Year 7/8 team from Mapua of Reuben Donnison, Emilian Meissner, Byron Spinetto and Joshua Furlong also showed fantastic skills, as they chose to tackle some very difficult challenges.

This is the first time the competition has been offered in this area, and we are very proud of our children in the way they have shown teamwork and perseverance in the challenges that are offered. The teams have been mentored by Clive Donnison during the lunchtimes for the last couple of weeks on a Monday and Tuesday, and we really appreciate him giving up his time for the children. He has done an admirable job!

The team now go through to the regional finals in September and we wish them all the best for this event.

The following information is about the competition, from the Epro 8 Website:

The EPro8 Challenge is a competition, an engineering and problem solving race. Every year over 9000 students from 800 schools from throughout New Zealand take part.

Teams compete to:

• build large sized structures
• solve practical problems
• engineer using pulleys, motors, gears, wheels and axles
• invent machines that can complete simple tasks
• undertake unusual and fun experiments.
• construct basic electronic circuits.
• solve interesting problems using practical maths

Each team of four will be based at a workstation containing an impressive assortment of easy to use parts and equipment. The 3 hour event begins with a tutorial on the equipment teams will be using.

Teams will then be given a booklet containing a number of challenges. All the challenges are of an entertaining physical nature.

Teams will choose which challenges they wish to undertake. The harder the challenge, the more points it is worth. There is not enough time to finish all the challenges - so strategy is required to know which ones to go for.

When teams have completed a challenge they push the "Big Red Button". They will be judged and the points will be added to the live leaderboard.