This year some of our Year 7 & 8 Science and Technology whizzes have been competing in the Epro8, within-school and inter-school, challenges.

The EPro8 Challenge is an Inter-School Science and Engineering Competition designed to promote science, engineering and problem-solving. Every year over 25,000 students from throughout New Zealand take part. Students must use teamwork to complete various challenges over a 2 hour period of building and problem-solving.

We had seven teams representing our LMS commons compete in our internal EPro8 Challenge event on Thursday 23 March. We also had three Year 10 EPro8 veterans show fantastic leadership and mentoring by acting as judges for this event. Thanks to Quinn Mulcahy, Cruise Green and Arwen Christian for their support.

Our winning team, Rubber Duckies (representing Puke) were Van Chambers, Reily Christian, Arianna Ehrler and Sadie Willett, and our second-placed team, Wildlings, (a Punawai and Tatahi collab) were Zac Abbott, Bonnie Love, Kyan Percy and Aiden Schulze. 

Both of these teams went on to compete in Round One of the BOP Interschool events in April, where the Rubber Duckies showed some amazing resilience resilience and teamwork against some tough competition and managed to come away in 2nd place! They moved on to the semi-final competition, which took place on Thursday 4 May.

The semi-final event theme was 80s arcade games and The Rubber Duckies decided to build the Space Invaders challenge. It was a tough challenge with some very complicated electronics. They were unfortunately knocked out of the competition coming in 7th place. Whilst they were understandably upset, they did us proud by holding their heads high and keeping it together until the very end.

Well done by all the students who took up the challenge! Next year we want to make the event bigger and better by running it over two days so more of our LMS can compete...watch this space!