On Friday, 24^th May, thirty enthusiastic students travelled to UTAS Inveresk to compete in the second heat of the Northen Science and Engineering Challenge along with seven other schools. The day consisted of the perpetual all day Bridge construction, along with 7 half day challenges. This year had three new challenges:

• Flight – design and construct a balsa wood glider.
• Wind Turbine – construct a wind turbine from cardboard and kebab sticks which rotated at the fastest possible speed. At the state final, the windmill also had to be able to lift weights within a 30 second limit.
• Fish trap – students were required to design a range of “barriers” to capture marbles of different sizes.

These tasks proved very challenging, however, all students persevered and worked efficiently in their teams of four. At the end of the day the school was successful, finishing with a score of 1419 points. This gave us a 71-point margin to a combined team of John Calvin/ Newstead Christian Schools who finished in second place.

As our school finished first on the Friday, we were invited back to the same location to compete in the State Final on the following Monday. For the state final, the challenges remained the same, however, each challenge had some changes – either altered resources or more complex scenarios to make them worthy of a final competition.

Despite many teams finding these challenges difficult with no individual category wins, consistency across all challenges was definitely a standout which resulted in our school finishing third in the state, only 6 points away from second.

All students are to be commended on their amazing maturity over the two days, especially with some very late call-ups due to students who were sick on the days. The experiences gained from working in challenging situations and with people they may have not even known prior to the day all help build important skills.

Richard Gregory