About 200 children attended the challenge and Rotary’s event organiser, Greg Moran, said a few different activities had been added this year.

“Some (activities) they actually took off the board about four or five years ago, now they’ve put them back on and beefed them up a little bit,” Mr Moran said.

The challenge was attended predominately by children from years 9 and 10, however, Inverell Public and Ross Hill Public schools had their teams there.

“The driving force behind this is the University of Newcastle (UON), and their Engineering department,” Mr Moran said.

“There was a real drop-off in the number of kids who were doing maths and science, and ultimately we want to show the kids a really good day and that science and engineering can be a hell of a lot of fun.”

Challenge organiser Pete Fullagar from UON said the challenge had been a big success.

“The students look to do the subjects in the high school because of their involvement in our day, and that is important because it has a flow-on effect into university,” Mr Fullagar said.

“We find, depending on the discipline within science or engineering, there’s approximately 10 to 30 per cent of those students who were influenced to study those undergraduate courses because of their involvement in the challenge.

Mr Fullagar said Australia still had a massive skills shortage in many different areas all across the country.

“The world is screaming for really great people and we can produce them,” he said.