Roncalli senior students enter their first EPro8 Challenge held at Hillmorton high School in Christchurch.

The EPro8 Challenge is well known amongst the primary schools in Timaru with their local competition hosted by Bluestone School, but little is known about the senior competition. Epro8 is an engineering challenge where students from all across New Zealand go and compete against each other to win.

This year Nick Monaco, Oliver Redhead, Jack McGrath and, Tobias Overbeeke went up to Hillmorton High School in Christchurch to compete. 

The way that the Epro8 challenges are designed is by starting with a relatively basic base such as a simple classroom (see image below) and as the task progresses they’ll have to add more components including moving parts, lights, alarms, etc. For this challenge, the four tasks were a car wash, a classroom (plus storm weathervane), a giant mousewheel, and a pendulum clock.

During the three hours, the team decided to work on a Car wash and a classroom with a built-in lighting rod. Ultimately the team came close to coming 4th but dropped down at the last minute and ended up in 7th out of 12 teams.

Each challenge has a points value associated with it and the scores continually change through the competition. Well done to the team on their first ever competition. I am sure we will be better prepared next year. 

A big thank you to Leah-Ann Overbeeke for driving the team to Christchurch and back.