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Egmont Village students (left) Cooper Riddick, 12, Jesse Smith, 11, Eddie Mills, 12, Isaac Richardson, 12, were lucky enough to get their hands on party poppers despite a shortage.

A national schools' competition has become a party pooper after causing a shortage of party poppers.

The EPro8 Challenge is a national inter-school science and engineering competition in which 13,000 students from 800 schools take part every year.

In term 2, students in Taranaki, Waikato, Otago and Canterbury have been completing the qualifying challenge, with the theme Happy New Year.

Teams of four have had to build a scale version of a famous landmark and construct a firework launching contraption that would launch party poppers.

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But with more than 4,098 budding engineers from the four regions taking part, a party popper is now hard to come by.

Egmont Village School students Issac Richardson, Eddie Mills, Cooper Riddick, and Jesse Smith got their party poppers as soon as the competition started.

Supplied/Stuff

Ain Dubai, with party poppers at the top, made by the Egmont Village School students.

The group was a little surprised there was a shortage of them, but admit it took them a number of the party poppers to perfect their creation of the Ain Dubai ferris wheel.

I wasnt expecting it," Jesse said.

But EPro8 is really popular," Eddie added.

ANDY JACKSON/Stuff

The team had come first in their division.

The group came first in the year 7 and 8 Taranaki division with their creation, and will go to the semi-finals on June 15 in Stratford.

Meanwhile, Ararira Springs Primary School in Lincoln had posted on their Facebook page asking people to part with their beloved poppers if they had any lying around, after they found Countdown, New World, The Warehouse and K-mart were out of stock.

It seems there is a city wide shortage due to the number of children taking part in this programme, the post read.

The lack of poppers had come as a shock for EPro 8 challenge manager Kelvin Thiele.

I guess we didnt really think about how many party poppers would be needed with this many students completing the qualifying challenge, he said.

In term 3, students from Auckland and Wellington will take part in the qualifying challenge, which Thiele admits they might need to reconsider.

Scott Hammond/Stuff

The Warehouse was sold out across most of their stores.

A pack of 50 party poppers at The Warehouse can only be bought in-store and 66 of their 90 shops throughout the country have now sold out.

Meanwhile, Foodstuffs NZ head of corporate affairs, Antoinette Laird, said they were also struggling to keep the shelves stocked, although that was also down to Covid-19.

The impact of Covid-19 on global trade continues to have its challenges, she said.

Customers might see some gaps on shelves for party poppers, and were working closely with suppliers to get more stock in.

But luckily Countdown was not having any problem.

We're not experiencing a shortage of party poppers - phew! a Countdown media spokesperson said in an email.

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Schools' engineering competition leads to party popper shortage in the regions - Stuff.co.nz