King’s High School students Seva Solomatenko, Nic Schollum, Luke Hammond and Ahnaf Monirul, all 18, placed second in both the New Zealand Engineering Science Competition (NZESC) and the University of Canterbury Engineering Challenge.
Seva said the team of four had been classmates for at least the past four years and knew each other well.
‘‘We were pretty on track with each other; we kind of thought the same.’’
For the NZESC, Seva and Luke worked on the statistics and research side of things, Ahnaf took care of the physics and Nic wrote the report and communicated their science.
They had eight hours to figure out how much energy could be stored in a gravity battery during a period of strong wind.
The group gathered New Zealand’s wind data for the past 20 years to answer that question.
They were well prepared for the task because they had spent about seven weekends together before the challenge, tackling past questions.
For the University of Canterbury challenge, the boys came up with a real-world model for home security which included coding an app to communicate with a 360 camera that watched over a client’s house.
Aside from the $500 cash award, the boys were motivated by completing hard engineering tasks.
They recommended future students also take part in the competition because it was a ‘‘great opportunity to challenge yourself’’.
