Ref: 019
Resource: Physics Olympics Competition
Topics: Various
Activity: Competition
Audience: KS3, KS4
# of pupils: Teams of 4, 12 – 35 teams
Location: In-School, could be held at a university
Author: David Morris; [email protected]
Partnership: York
Year last updated: 2013
Purpose:
To raise the profile of physics in what is a fun, stimulating and challenging way. We give
each team a name of a famous physicist and have a power point running in the hall at the
start with some information on that physicist, so that the children are always being given new
things to learn about.
Outline of the Day
The St. Peter’s School Physics Olympics Competition for year 8 pupils first took place in
2007 and has grown form 17 teams in the first year to 35 in 2013. The competition is open to
all schools and attracts teams from as far away as Newcastle in the North East and Bury and
Chester in the North West. Our target is to attract 35 teams. The competition has six
individual events, five of which are similar in style to a mini Egg Race and take about 30
minutes each, with the sixth exercise being a nearest power of ten Fermi Quiz that is
ongoing throughout the day. There are prizes for the six individual event winners and the
overall first, second and third placed teams and also mementos of the day for all who have
been involved. The day is primarily about measurement - the highest, the quickest, the
closest etc. It is about precision of measurement - to the nearest mm, the nearest 0.01s and
also about estimation where quantities are roughly estimated to the nearest power of 10. e.g.
what is the volume of toothpaste that is used in the U K in a year. It is also about scale with
the pupils thinking about atoms on the microscopic scale (10-10m) up to distances to the
nearest star (1016m). It is also about teamwork and communication skills with pupils having
to work together to complete a task against the clock. The day is designed primarily to be
fun, but also challenging and stimulating and of course there is, in the Olympic spirit, an
element of competition with Gold, Silver and Bronze medal winners. The aim is that pupils
come away having both enjoyed their experience and also having learnt some physics.
At the end of the day the students go away with a goody bag. I attract sponsorship from
various people including the IOP to buy things for the goody bag, but also like to include a
selection of things from the IOP including IOP pens, pencils, rubbers, bugs, stickers etc.
There are up to 230 people involved in the day who all receive a goody bag.
Budget:
The competition can be set up relatively inexpensively using standard laboratory equipment
or money can be spent (if it is available) in buying in special bits of kit.
Benefits:
Pupils are definitely stretched by the day and learn new skills and techniques, such as
estimation and power of 10 notation. Pupils develop team skills as they are pushed for time
when working against the clock. It is good to have a competitive element to the day.
Accompanying teachers pick up half a dozen or so new ideas for challenges that they can
take away to use in their schools. (I try to develop new games each year to keep it fresh for
the teachers who generally come back year after year, although good games can be
recycled as the pupils who come each year are different). Pupils are learning good physics
in a different environment from the normal lesson situation; at the presentation ceremony at
the end of the day each of the teachers who have been in charge of each game give a short
explanation of the main physics points that needed to be addressed in their game. Pupils are
given a physics book in their goodie bags (one of the Uncle Albert Books written by Russell
Stannard for 13 year olds, which are superb books to introduce pupils to some of the exciting
ideas of physics).
Pitfalls:
Takes a lot of preparation and organisation to make the day run smoothly and you need the
support of your technician and colleagues. We have five labs in operation at any one time;
we try to put three teachers and some sixth formers in each lab. The big problem comes at
change over as the last game stuff has to be tidied away and new equipment put out for the
new teams coming in. The timings are tight so lots of helpers (teachers and sixth formers)
are needed to be able to do this in a short period of time.
List of Equipment:
General lab equipment or some special equipment can be purchased. For example this year
we made a marble run game which required a steel ball bearing to be released from an
electromagnet and finally hit a trap door so that the ball took the longest time to travel as
recorded on an electronic timer. We went out and bought some marble run games from
ToysRus to give each team some plastic pieces, but we also bought some pieces of gutter
and tubing etc so that each team had the same selection of various pieces each.
Preparatory Work / Follow Up:
Teams have to be invited well in advance (probably a couple of months). All the stuff for
goodie bags needs to be ordered well in advance and goodie bags need preparing. All of the
games worksheets need to be written and equipment for each game prepared. We have five
labs on the go at any one time with in our case 7 teams and a teacher team in each lab (this
year we put all of the teachers from the seven school teams in each lab into a teacher team
who did the task in a separate teacher competition). This means each lab needs eight sets
of equipment put out. This can all be scaled down so you could have four teams in each lab
plus a teacher team if for example you had 20 teams in total competing. At the end of the 35
mins all of the teams move on so that at the end of the day the teams have passed through
all of the games and can be ranked on each game. The sixth game is the Fermi Quiz which
is completed during the day and handed in at the end of the fourth game session. I take
photos during the day and as part of the follow up I send out a DVD to each school with the
photos on and also all of the worksheets for the games and a summary of the results. (Photo
permission forms are required).
Additional information
I have attracted quite a lot of sponsorship from the Ogden Trust, the IOP and various local
organisations and businesses and with this money we buy t-shirts that are worn by our staff
and sixth form helpers on the day and also given to the team members that win the six
individual events and also the gold, silver and bronze winners. We also buy each pupil a
water bottle, memory stick and physics book and some other small things to go in the goody
bag that they take home with them at the end of the day.
You should be able to find some information about the last six year’s events on our school
website at the following link:
http://www.st-peters.york.sch.uk/stpeters_info.asp?pid=5&sid=52&ssid=545
Not all of the reports are full, but you should find some photo galleries that will give you an
idea of the sort of events that we hold and the following link has a programme that gives
some timings that we use:
http://www.st-peters.york.sch.uk/Images/Temp//Programme(1).pdf
We hold the competition on the Wednesday of our internal examination week so that the
labs are not being used much and we have five labs in operation throughout the day, with up
to seven teams in each lab. We also get the teachers to form a team so that each lab needs
a total of 8 stations. Basically the teams move from lab to lab throughout the day to complete
all of the tasks.
I attach a Fermi Quiz that we used last year to give you an idea of what we do.
I hope this information is helpful to you and please do get back to me if I can be of any
further assistance. I have thoroughly enjoyed running the competition over the last six years
but it is a lot of hard work to make it run smoothly on the day and there is a lot of preparation
to be done before hand. The games all need to have a measurement so you need to dream
up challenges that have a measurement and can be completed in 30 minutes. A simple one
that we use is to give everyone the same newspaper and roll of masking tape and see who
can make a tower to support a pack of crème eggs the highest distance off the ground. Each
team will get a measurement which then makes the ranking easy.
As a variation on this you can build towers out of spaghetti and jelly babies or you could just
give them 10 sheets of A4 paper each and see how high they could get with that. As a
variation on a tower you could build a bridge between two supports. One year the teams had
to build a structure to support a wall tile a certain height above the bench and the challenge
was to achieve this using the least mass of paper straws that they were provided with. You
could build a boat out of a selection of plastic cups, paper etc that would float with the
greatest number of marbles held. Using moments to find the mass of something is also a
good easy game. Things that move are usually good as well, such as balloon cars. I attach
a few of the games that we used last year to give you an idea of how we present them. In
recent years I have tried to include a game where they have to calibrate an instrument and
one where they have to do some really careful measurements, such as Hippopotomas
(instructions attached). In this game the technician had to load the cuddly toys with rice to
make sure that they were all of the same mass.