The goal of the UK YPT is to pick the UK team to go to the International Young Physicists Tournament (IYPT)
The International Young Physicists’ Tournament (IYPT), sometimes referred to as the “Physics World Cup”, is a scientific competition between teams of secondary school students. It mimics, as close as possible, the real-world scientific research and the process of presenting and defending the results obtained.
Participants have almost a year to work on 17 open-ended inquiry problems. A good part of the problems involves easy-to-reproduce phenomena presenting unexpected behaviour.
The aim of the solutions is not to calculate or reach “the correct answer” as there is no such notion here. The Tournament is rather conclusions-oriented as participants have to design and perform experiments, and to draw conclusions argued from the experiments’ outcome.
The competition itself is not a pen-and-paper competition but an enactment of a scientific discussion (or a defence of a thesis) where participants take the roles of Reporter, Opponent and Reviewer and are evaluated by an international Jury.
The beauty of the Tournament is that teams can take quite different routes to tackle the same problem. As long as they stay within the broadly defined statement of the problem, all routes are legitimate and teams will be judged according to the depths reached by their investigations.
A few warnings first...
Unless your school is willing to do a joint trip with another school, you will need at least five secondary school students and two teachers willing to supervise EXTENSIVE lab work AND take you all to the international competition.
We get zero sponsorship, so if you are selected you will have to bear the cost of the trip
If you think you can do all this then please get one of the teachers supervising to contact: sp@stpaulsschool.org.uk
You get started on the 17 open-ended problems - you need to develop a theory and working model and do A LOT of experiments to provide robust evidence that your model is correct.
We will run a national round in January of each year. Each participating school should bring their best five students. Students will present on their findings for 15 minutes to a panel of judges. The judges will then choose the best school or if schools are willing to do joint trips the best candidates for the team. We will at most have two schools making up a team.
You don't have to stop working on the problems if you are not selected! Just because you are not going to the IYPT does not mean you cannot contribute to the team!
The team going needs to work exceptionally hard to solve at least 10 problems really well, ready for the main event in July.
Please contact: sp@stpaulsschool.org.uk