Whaea Kim has been running an Epro8 After School Club with some of the Tall Poppies: Micah Verstappen, Lucas Coster, Jefferson Clark and Josh Tokelove from Room 12, and Regan Cumming, Hannah Rawson, Lincoln Couper, Imogen Munns, Lacey Graham, Logan Wood, Laura Wood, Hayden Wright, Jessica Tokelove, Myles East, Summer Russell from Room 10.

Every Monday, from 2:30 - 3:30pm, Whaea Kim and the TP’s go to Room 11 to get out the EPro8 kits and do different challenges. The kits are fun and interesting to work with. If you're good at working in a team, building and problem solving there is a chance we may get selected to represent the school in the official interschool competition. 

In Epro8, we have to complete a series of challenges which involve engineering and problem solving skills. Each week we complete a challenge with the kits or using the electronic simulator. Our school has bought three of these kits. Each kit is made up of 60 lengths of aluminium, wheels, pulleys, axles, large gears, small gears, tools, joiners, rope, bolts, wing nuts and reel. We use this equipment to build large sized structures and/or invent simple machines. In the official competition there are actual electronics, but school kits don’t have electronics, so we use an online electronic simulator. Epro8 has a website, and on it, we are still able to learn how the electronics work, so when we go to the competition, we will know how to use them in real life.

Our first club session was on Monday 1st March. We had to go on the Epro8 website and follow a tutorial to show how each part in the kit works. For our second session, we had another skill-based tutorial on how to make a gearbox. In the third session, we built a fire truck with a ladder that could be raised up by a pulley. In our latest session we built a limbo bar that had to be as big as a door frame - we are continuing with that next session.

Student Voice:

Myles East: My favourite part is doing the building.

Imogen Munns: It’s fun to build, and the Electronic Simulator is cool.

Lacey Graham: I like doing the challenges and learning how to build things I wouldn’t normally build.

Josh Tokelove: I really enjoy doing it and I hope that I get selected for the competition.

We, Micah and Lucas, really enjoy doing Epro8 because we have always been into that type of stuff. We really hope we get selected for the competition so we can be challenged.