ORONO, Maine (NEWS CENTER) — Middle and high schoolers from across the state were able to compete Friday in the Windstorm Challenge and Wind Blade Challenge engineering competitions.

The event was hosted by and took place at UMaine’s Advanced Structures & Composites Center.

Teams of students competed on two projects, one was to build a stable floating wind turbine. The other, to create the most energy efficient wind blade.

Students have been designing and building their projects over the past few months and on Friday they got to see whose designs were best.

“I think it’s really important because like air, energy and stuff that’s like the future and that’s what we’re gonna have to use eventually when the oil and everything runs out, and so I think this is really important in getting kids involved in it at this age” said Lindsay Wells, a junior at Orono High School.

“Gave us an opportunity to sort of be more professional, you know at King we get to do, we get to do a lot of things but I’ve never done something of this scale before,” said Lucy Kilbreth, an 8th-grade student at King Middle School in Portland.

Students also gave presentations about their projects earning points as well – the team with the most points from each competition gets a $20,000 scholarship to work in the laboratory.

The winners…

Windstorm Challenge 2016

1st Place: Falmouth High School A6

2nd Place: King Middle School B18

3rd Place: Caribou Middle School B2

Maine Composites Alliance’ 8th Annual Wind Blade Challenge 2016

1st Place: Bangor High School Team 1

2nd Place: Freeport High School

3rd Place: Lewiston High School Team 4

Copyright 2016 WCSH