The International Physics Olympiad is a competition for secondary school students run every year in another country. There are over 60 countries which take part and more new countries enter every year. Each country normally enters a team of five although the competition is run more on an individual basis. There are two parts to the exam - a theoretical exam, normally with 3 problems, and a practical exam. Gold, silver and bronze medals along with honourable mentions are then awarded on the basis of the results of these exams. There are also prizes for the best in each of the three problems in the theoretical exam and a prize for the best practical.
The first year an Irish team was entered was in 1998. Now the team is
picked every year at the Irish Science Olympiad in DCU, where young
people from all over the country go looking for a chance to represent
their country. Teams are picked for physics, chemistry, biology and
computer programming, and competition is pretty stiff. The first Irish
physics team went to Reykjavic in Iceland and the team consisted of
In 1999 the competition was held in Padua in Italy. This time the
irish team was
Our leaders for the trip were Enda McGlynn from DCU and David G. Rea from St. Colman's Fermoy. We were also joined by Michael Cotter who had the massive job of organising the entire trip.
Not too bad actually (our leaders seemed very surprised by this). Hero of the day was Barkley who got a bronze medal (and a really nice graphics calculator), and then Rory and I both got honourable mentions, so all in all it was a good week's work.
The Olympiad isn't really run like most people would expect. I thought there'd be a lot of people working and lots of physics and you know what I mean, but to be honest it was more like a whole bunch of people on holiday who happened to have an exam in the middle. The tests weren't on until about 5 days into the event so all we mostly did was go sight seeing and get to know everyone. To help with the foreign language and culture and to generally make sure you enjoyed yourself each team was assigned a guide who could speak at least one of their native languages. The Irish guide was the lovely Erica Vardanega, who you can see in some of the photos. Personally I had a brilliant time in Italy and and do it all again if I could. If you want to see for yourself what Italy was like and what we all look like then click here. (All the photos are fairly large so downloading coud take a while, but be patient)
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This will take you to a page with links to all the IPhO, past and present, with a few other links thrown in. |
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Photo page |
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My Homepage |
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Irish Science Olympiad site |
