With exams over for the year, it doesn’t mean that learning stops! Over the last two days, the Goodfellow Centre has been a fast-paced hub of engineering teamwork as groups of Year 8 students pooled their problem-solving skills to compete in the EPro8 Challenge.

EPRO8 pits teams of students against one another to complete a variety of tasks in a set amount of time. Each team was located at a workstation that contained an impressive assortment of equipment, including gears, wheels, pulleys, weights, tools, aluminium framing, motors and electronics. Working quickly and collaboratively, the teams were required to plan/design and build a range of solutions to novel problems, all within certain specifications and under time pressure. The heat was on! 

From creating a robotic guard dog that can wag its tail, bark and sit on command from at least two metres away, to a working prototype for a theme park ride, a solar powered satellite with two dimensional tracking and a bridge to hold a four wheeled test vehicle that activates a traffic light, their work was cut out! Practical problems were solved, machines invented to complete tasks, electronic circuits were constructed and mathematical workings employed.

In addition, there was a need for some strategic thinking. The harder the challenge, the greater the possible score – but there was not enough time for the teams to complete all the challenges – the strategy required working out which best to choose for maximum points in the allocated time! Throughout the challenge, a live leader board kept track of the score, increasing the sense of urgency and competition.

This was a fantastic opportunity for our Middle College students to work collaboratively on tasks that were mentally challenging, requiring them to draw on scientific, technological and mathematical principles, while learning to listen and value each other’s opinions.

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• Middle College

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