Katikati College wins Waikato and Bay of Plenty Epro8 grand final

The EPro8 inter-school grand final winners, from left, Liam Kean, E Wallace and Jordan Hughes. Absent: Hannah Gourlay. Photo / Rebecca Mauger

A Katikati College science and engineering team have smashed the competition at the EPro8 Challenge inter-school grand finals... beating their mostly older peers.

The maths, engineering and science buffs beat 12 of the best teams at the Waikato-Bay of Plenty Year 11-13 grand final on June 8.

The EPro8 Challenge is a science and engineering competition designed to promote science, engineering and problem-solving. Teams of four race against the clock with two and a half hours to complete up to four “challenges”.

Those Guys from KKC are thought to be the youngest team at the competition - one of their crew is just 14. They were up against many Year 13 teams. The team were led by Hannah Gourlay and Liam Kean, who have been involved with EPro8 since Year 5. Jordan Hughes and E Wallace joined the team last year.

The work stations as part of the challenge include an assortment of equipment such as gears, wheels, pulleys, joiners, nuts and bolts, tools, aluminium framing, motors and electronics.

Finishing three challenges is a feat in its own right and Those Guys from KKC completed the third challenge with a minute and a half to spare and 200 points ahead of the runner-ups.

“It was stressful, we went through about four packets of lollies,” Liam said. There were challenges within challenges, he said, which intensified at each task.

The first challenge was constructing a conveyor belt for apples, with a light to go on when an apple travels past.

The second was to make was a tool to scoop apples off trees (connected by magnets) and involved a lot of maths, E Wallace said.

“We had to work out how many you could do in a minute and see how much money you could earn. We had to build a set of scales to measure them and see how many you could pick in an hour.”

This was the easier of three, he said, and took half an hour.

The third challenge was to create a juice machine to shake the juice and another to drive the cup forward and tip it out, Jordan says.

“We had so much in our structure that we actually started running out of pieces and had to start getting them from other teams,” Liam said.

The team initially placed third in their heat out of 12 teams which qualified them to advance to the semifinals round where they placed second. Two days later they were back for the grand final.

Teamwork is pivotal to success, says school coordinator Hamish Carr, as different members of the team can be working on structures, electronics and mathematics for a single challenge, maximising their time.

Their roles vary within the group. Jordan is the “master of bracing” (coined by his peers).

“I’m more about the structural department and I make sure everything is level. Occasionally, when the others may be losing it, that’s when I will come and in and help them.”

The team members say Jordan makes structures so strong that they could “probably hit them with a truck and they’d still be standing”.

Liam and Hannah are experts in wiring and E Wallace’s strong point is mathematics.

The team received individual trophies, the supreme Ero8 Challenge trophy, certificates and University of Waikato gear.