By Felix Milner

Since we came first in the Interschool Epro8 Competition we had to go to Hamilton for the semifinals at Maeroa Intermediate School. We left Parawai at 2pm and got to Maeroa around 3:30pm and it started at 4 o’clock. 

Then it began, there were 12 teams competing for the top four spots. The challenges were arcade themed with challenges such as Pac-Man, Space invaders, Tetris, and Dance Dance Revolution. This involved using physical pixels to make characters and shapes. 

Our parawai team started with the space invaders which involved making an alien out of 28 pixels. We then had to make a moving frame. After that we had to use pulleys and motors to lift and lower the alien. We spent a lot of time on this because we had double looped the pulleys which blew the fuse. We then had to make a bazooka with a torch and a magnifying glass that would create a focused point on our alien. We had to make it detect the light and count how many times you hit it using a light sensor and a counter. The next challenge was to make it move back and forth detecting when it hit something and reversing the direction with limit switches ( limit switches detect when something is touching them and send an electric signal) and sequence boxes. We were ever so slightly too slow to complete it so we were in a seven way tie for fourth. The final challenge that we didn’t get to was incredibly hard. The challenge involved making it so that the alien went down when the limit switches hit something. 

There was a tiebreaker for who would go through, it was who could get a large gear to the highest point by attaching it to a freestanding structure. Sadly we did not win the tiebreaker so we did not go though. 

All in all it was a very fun event that I would very highly recommend for any children wanting to do it.