The idea of having a Nordic regional engineering competition first sprang to life at the Nordic BEST Regional Meeting (RM) in Røros, Autumn 2007. The Nordic engineering competition did however not get a kick start until the RM in Copenhagen, in Spring 2009. Shortly after, a coordinator was selected, followed by the selection of a hosting BEST group. At the next RM in Uppsala, Autumn 2009, the Nordic engineering competition got its name, nordBEC, now named EBEC Nordic, standing for European BEST Engineering Competition Nordic.

The first EBEC Nordic was held in Copenhagen, 27th-31st of March, 2010. Great cooperation of Nordic BEST groups with a huge help from sponsors: Maersk, LEGO, Vestas and Microsoft made this fabulous event happen. 60 students representing 8 Nordic Universities of Technology obtained passes for EBEC Nordic by winning Local BEST Engineering Competitions (LBECs) at their home universities. They came to Denmark to check their creativity, engineering skills, get new friends and have some fun.

The competition was divided into two categories – Team Design (TD) and Case Study (CS). The TD task was based on LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 sets provided by LEGO. Can you imagine grown-up students spending 8 hours fulfilling their childhood dreams to create unstoppable LEGO robots to beat all their opponents? On the other hand the CS task provided by Maersk demanded from students to develop theoretical solution of a problem that sometimes overwhelms even experienced engineers such as power management solutions for oil platforms as in this case.

Of course, the participant schedule was not only filled with competition tasks. Personal trainings and various social activities didn’t let them get bored even for a second. Winners got free tickets to European BEST Engineering Competition (EBEC) Final, which was held in August 2010 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

The history of the competition is still short, but EBEC Nordic has already became one of the largest among all the other national and regional competitions in BEST. The third edition of EBEC Nordic will be held in Stockholm from the 1th to 5th of April 2012. This time almost 80 students representing 9 Nordic universities of technology will meet to compete for being selected as the best Nordic engineering students and get a chance to participate in the EBEC final that will happen in August 2012 in Zagreb, Croatia.