IYPT

What is 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.

In 2013, IYPT was awarded the medal of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) in recognition of its inspiring and wide-ranging contribution to physics education that has touched many lives and countries, over the past 25 years.

The Advantages

Team Work: The structure of the tournament and of the preparation requires a high amount of team work. The ability to cooperate in an organized way as well as the ability to organize oneself’s own work is one of the most important soft-skills which are required by today’s economy.

Knowledge: Of course working with the IYPT problems teaches a lot of scientific knowledge. This, however, is done quite differently than in usual science classes. Due to the more project-oriented and practical work the knowledge will be retained much longer. Furthermore one also learns how to apply the new knowledge.

Research: Since IYPT problems are formulated in a very open way they offer a perfect way to accomodate oneself with the methods of scientific research. Working on IYPT problems can help in finding a way to deal with completely new questions and tasks.

Rhetorical Skills: Rhetorical skills are one of the very important aspects of the IYPT. It is important to present the prepared solutions in a convincing and impressive way. Moreover one needs to be spontaneous to be able to react on the reports of others and to prepare an opponence speech and a discussion within very little time. The IYPT offers a possibilty to train how to sell oneself at best.

Language Skills: Since the official language of the IYPT is English (which is a foreign language for most of the participants) it offers also a great opportunity to train language skills. In particular one learns a lot of technical terms and science English, which is usually not the case in regular classes.

International Aspect: The IYPT is is an excellent chance to visit another country and to get to know young people from all over the world and possibly to form friendship.

IYPT 2024 Official Problem Set

Contacts: IOC representer: Candidate of Physics and Mathematical Sciences (PhD)
Kunduz Turekhanova
kunduz@physics.kz
kunduz.turekhanova@fizmat.kz
Official site of IYPT: https://www.iypt.org/