Fr om November 23 to November 30, the 7th International Experimental Physics Olympiad (IEPhO-2019) was held in the Lepel District, Vitebsk Region in the Republic of Belarus. Several hundred students in grades 8-11 from Belarus, Russia, Armenia, and Bulgaria participated.
The NSU SESC high school team returned with four medals.
The SESC team was made up of Vladimir Popov (grade 9), Mikhail Mashkov (grade 9), Andrey Shcherbakov (grade 10), Valery Parfenov (grade 10), Yuri Kashpurovich (grade 10), Kirill Zhivetiev (grade 10 ), Gleb Pastushchuk (grade 11), Sergey Pidenko (grade 11), Sergey Presnyakov (grade 11), and Alexander Berdyugin (grade 11). The team leaders were senior lecturers in the SESC Physics Department Maria Yuldasheva and Oleg Mukhutdinov.
The Olympiad consisted of three rounds, each round required participants to conduct two experimental tasks. The time allotted for each task was 2 hours 20 minutes. An international jury assessed the participants’ work.
Olympiad jury member and SESC team leader Maria Yuldasheva talked about this year’s competition,
The tasks seemed more difficult this year, but they were very diverse and interesting. The 9th and 10th graders were pleased with the problem concerning the Peltier element. The 11th grade problems were the hardest, they involved standing waves, complex thermodynamics, and magnetic black boxes, but the team remembered the most about the metallophone. Belarus greeted participants with warm weather, green winter fields, and a very welcoming atmosphere. Between the rounds, our team had a great time playing laser tag and winning “What? Wh ere? When?”.
SESC students won four medals in the individual competition: Andrey Shcherbakov, “silver”, Vladimir Popov, Kirill Zhivetiev and Sergey Presnyakov, “bronze”. Igor Lotov (9th grade, Lyceum No. 130) prepared for and participated in the Olympiad, and received a bronze medal along with the SESC team.
IEPhO, the only international Olympiad in experimental physics in the world, was launched in 2013. SESC has been a participant from the beginning. The Olympiad is organized by the Foundation for the Support of Innovative Programs "Education and Science" with the participation of the “Moscow Center for Pedagogical Excellence” and the "National Center for Continuing Natural Science Education".
