Mackay Daily Mercury
Dominic Geiger: 1 September 2012
Schools from throughout the region raced state-of-the-art model cars at St Patrick’s College for the Re-Engineering Australia Formula One F1 in Schools Technology Competition.
The national competition encourages students with an interest in engineering to duke it out against their peers on a 20-metre long model race track.
St Patrick’s student Alex Wilson is the team manager for the Mad Thrashers.
He said he was surprised how much he had learnt in the lead-up to the competition.
“It’s come as quite a shock to us,” Alex said.
“The best thing is how we’ve progressed because this is our first year and we just didn’t expect to get the times we did. I want to give a shout out to my team and how they’ve helped … I couldn’t do it without them.”
Local engineering and mining companies as well as educational institutions were also on site yesterday to offer advice for students considering a career in engineering.
St Patrick’s industrial arts teacher Simon Korneliussen said the competition helped students get a feel for what a career in engineering meant.
“There’s a shortage of engineers across Australia and the idea is to get school students involved,” Mr Korneliussen said. Despite close results, Mirani High School outperformed the rest, with wins in all three divisions. High Calibre won the professional senior division, Apastron won professional junior division and Nitro Performance won development division.
