We are proud to share that our Senior EPro8 Team won the Auckland Grand Final of the EPro8 Competition!

The students in the team were: Jin Lee, Erina Islam, Gayathri Dinesh, and Arabella McDonald. This team beat out 96 other teams in the very competitive Auckland heats and semi-final rounds to take out the top spot. 

The competition was 2.5 hours long and students were given 4 engineering challenges to select from. The team went in with a clear strategy and worked incredibly fast to be the first team with points on the scoreboard, and they held first place for most of the 2.5 hours with Glendowie College, and Western Springs College nipping at their heels.

The scoreboard was turned off in the last 10 minutes of the competition, so while teams were gaining points we had no idea who was leading. The team managed to complete 1 whole challenge, however we were unsure if the final component of the second challenge was enough to secure us the lead. Surprisingly the team placed first equal! However there was only one trophy - so we had to face off against Western Springs College in a sudden-death challenge to build the tallest possible free-standing structure that supported a wheel at the top, in 3 minutes.

The team had been in this situation back in 2022 and lost, so it was all on the line! I’ve never seen a group of students work so fast and they’d learned from their mistake back in 2022 and made sure that this time they had a large enough and well-constructed base before going tall. My heart was in my mouth and I felt sick watching, but when the final buzzer went and the students took their hands off the structure they had won!

It was a beautiful redemption moment for this particular team, who won the 2021 Grand Final, then came first equal in 2022 only to miss out on the trophy in the sudden death competition, and not even placing last year.

A huge congratulations to this team!