IYPT Overview
IYPT is a team-oriented scientific competition among teams of secondary school students. The participants present their solutions to scientific problems they have prepared over several months and then discuss their solutions with other teams. The roles of Reporter (Presentation), Opponent and Reviewer are graded by a jury consisting of international experts.
Website: iypt.org
Basics
- teams of 5 members (students) + 1 team leader (adult)
- secondary school (high school) students
Official rules: http://iypt.org/Official_Documents/Tournament_Regulations
Timeline
- problems released at the end of August
- strongly recommended to start working early (first contact in September)
- registration for IYPT: January (December for a new country)
- selection + registration of the representing team for IYPT: end of May
- IYPT: usually second half of July
Problems
- 17 open physics problems
- 3 can be skipped without penalty
- no single solution – the problems are open-ended
- both theory and experiments needed to succeed
- collaboration with other people (e.g. university professors) is allowed and encouraged
- 12 minutes to present the solution, 14 minutes for the opponent + discussion, 4 minutes for the reviewer
- full timing information: http://iypt.org/new_Tournament_regulations#VII._The_Stage_regulations
- example solution (2013): Elastic Space (PPTX) (apologies for the proprietary format)
- scoring guidelines (read this to know what is expected): http://iypt.org/Official_Documents/Guidelines
- solutions archive: http://archive.iypt.org/solutions/
- see Key physics for a list of concepts that appear often
IYPT Participation
- 1 team per country can participate at the IYPT
- to select the representation team, the usual approach is a country-wide competition
- if the number of potential participants is small (e.g. when bootstrapping a new country), other ways of selecting the IYPT team are fine
- it should be possible for anyone in the represented country to participate
- see http://iypt.org/About/Join for details
- physics fights are in English
- financial:
- accommodation & co. is provided (for 5 members + 1 team leader, probably – TODO find out)
- transportation to the venue, travel insurance and such is not provided
- in some countries participation is funded by the ministry of education
- in case the team would be unable to participate for financial reasons, partial help may be provided – TODO find out contact