Hard hours pay off for science squad

COOL KIDS: The Brunswick School students formed a team called The Atomical Geniuses. From left they are Akshima Marwah, Caleb Squire, Luke Squire, and Charlie Schwamm.PHOTO/ STUART MUNRO

A team of Whanganui kids spent Wednesday night slaving away in an engineering challenge, in which they came in third place for the Manawatu/Whanganui region.

The Atomical Geniuses had two-and-a-half hours to complete as many challenges as they could in the EPro8 Grand Final competition this week.

Akshima Marwah, 11, Caleb Squire, 12, Charlie Schwamm, 11, and Luke Squire, 12, were looking a little worn out when they came back to Brunswick School the next day, teacher Sarah Lourie said.

"They arrived at school looking fairly exhausted the next morning."

She said the competition ran fairly late for the children and was intense the whole time.

"It's two-and-a-half hours of high thinking," she said.

The challenge starts off with each team of four being placed at a workstation with all the equipment it needs. Team members are then given a booklet full of challenges. The harder challenges are worth more points, and the children can pick which challenges they want to do. The team with the most points at the end of the competition wins.

The Whanganui team were able to build a self-propelled moon buggy, which was one of its favourite challenges.

The buggy could go backwards and forwards and could stop when it hit objects.

"We may have blown about three fuses on that one," Caleb said. "That wasn't compared to how many rubber bands we snapped on the bungy jumping," Charlie replied.

He said the "weight that represents the person" on the challenge hit the ground and then didn't have enough bounce.

Akshima said they named the weight Bob.

Luke thought the flying fox challenge was the "most stressing".

All the children said they enjoyed maths and science at school, but Charlie was the creative side of this team, according to Mrs Lourie.

"This is my first year at Brunswick School and I'm totally blown away. These kids are amazingly intelligent," she said.

She wanted to thank the parents who supported the team in the challenge.