United States Places 23rd in 37th Annual IYPT Competition

Five United States students and three high-school teachers traveled to Budapest, Hungary in July to compete in the annual international young physicists' tournament to present the research that they had been working on for the past school year. These students: Lyla Elboubkri, Matt MacDougall, Cowan Hahn, William Shiu, and Poyraz Ozer each played an important role in the team either reporting, opposing, or reviewing. 

The presentation portion of the fight is the most difficult and such has the most weight in the scoring. It consists of first the presenter showing their research in a 30+ slide powerpoint, they then have to defend their research against not just the opposition, but the questions from the review and the panel of judges.  Over the five rounds that Team USA competed in Lyla, Matt, and Cowan presented once, with William Shiu doing so twice. Lyla presented the most challenging problem in the catalogue Quantum Light Dimmer. This problem states that when a sodium flame is placed inside of a strong magnetic field the luminance properties of the light are altered. This is due to a phenomenon called the Zeeman Effect  which is the splitting of spectral lines, which are the frequencies of light emitted by an object, into multiple components when inside a static magnetic field. This problem proved difficult to research in the way that the phenomenon was hard to observe with the tools inside of a high-school physics lab. Although through these hardships a presentation was produced that was presented in the first round of IYPT.  Matt MacDougall presented the problem Cushion Catapult in the second round, this problem investigates the relevant parameters surrounding the phenomenon. A Cushion Catapult is created when either one or multiple objects are dropped onto an inflated cushion, an object then statically placed on the cushion will be launched off as a result of the dropped items collision with the bag. Team USA presented a unique solution to this problem in that we treated the transfer of energy from one object to another as a wave using the bag as its medium. The result of this different solution was that it earned one of the best presentation scores that team USA produced, tying for second. Cowan presented Droplet Microscope in the final round of the tournament. This problem states that a droplet placed on a glass surface can be used as a magniftying image system, the goal of this research was to quantify the limitng factors on resolution and investigate the magnification of the droplet system. Cowan developed a program that simulated the way that light rays interacted with the droplet geometry, the results of which allowed the quantification of exactly what a certain geometries optic properties are. This program is freely available and open source on GitHub for use and modification by anyone. William Shiu was the only person on Team USA that had the opportunity to present twice, he showed off Invent Yourself and Ping Pong Rocket. Invent Yourself is about the accuracy to which you can predict the number of objects inside of a container just based off of the sounds produced while being shaken. His Invent Yourself took a novel solution to the problem using machine learning the attack the problem in a way that no other team did. Some of the judges enjoyed this solution stating that it as the way they would have approached the problem while others said that it didn't include enough physics for their liking. Because of this it earned the highest spread in judges scores the US received, earning both an eight while simultaneously being given a two. IYPT is prepared for the judges disagreeing with each other and counts the highest and the lowest scores as half the weight as all others. After this averaging Invent Yourself was placed firmly on good grounds as far as presentation scores are noted. Ping Pong Rocket was another strong presentation that helped team USA in its best round, round four when the US won the room tying with Romania and beating the United Kingdom.

Opposition is the second most active position in the tournament, your role in this spot is to for 10 minutes try and break apart and engage the presentor in a scientific conversation. You need to discuss any flaws that you find in their work as well as provide insight on how to improve the research being prevented. It requires both creativity and sharpness to be able to be able to simultaneously be reviewing their work for even the most minute detail while also creating discussion points in your head. This means especially that a student needs to be well versed if not having been the person to research the topic being discussed. Cowan handled two oppositions, Lyla one, while Matt picked up the other two. This position has a little more control as the team gets to challenge the reporter on what they want them to present. In our first opposition Cowan opposed Slovenia presenting Droplet Microscope, this opposition went very much in team USA as it produced our second highest opposition score. Cowan also opposed Poland in the second round when they presented Charge Meter, Poland notably is the team that earned 3rd place in the whole event. They put together some of the best reports out of any team at the competition, but that leads to some of the best scientific discussion there can be and Cowan put up a solid opposition score against them.  The round three opposition against Macao was handled by Matt, they presented Shooting Rubber Band. This problem was the other problem that Matt had put together and as such he engaged in the best opposition that team USA had done. This problem is about the maximum distance you can shoot a rubber band by inducing a spin on it through uneven stretching of the rubber band, the respectful discussion and flaws that Matt pointed out are responsible for team USA's best round out of the whole tournament earning 34.9 points total across report, opposition, and review. Round four was quite a difficult round for us as we had a short amount of possible problems we could challenge team UK on, this led to the scenario were Lyla had to oppose a problem that we had never actually prepared for. Although with their high-level understanding of magnetics their opposition of the problem Magnetic Gear was very resourceful pulling from just their pure knowledge of the fundamental concepts underlying the phenomena. In round five Matt was back again for a similar scenario needing to oppose a problem that we had not researched, although this time we knew in advance what problem would be presented. Team USA prepped Matt as best as they could for every possible scenario regarding the way team Italy could have handled this problem. The other advantage going into this round is that all the prior presentations had been published for others to see, so preparing for this problem was simpler in that we could review what other teams had done. The fruits of this work were that the opposition was a success and allowed for a final great score in this category.

There is not as much to say about the review phase of the competition, this part is probably the most team oriented position. Whereas the only way the team can help you in the other positions is by sending sticky notes to you at the front of the room, at review the whole entire team is spending the whole fight preparing the person to go up and give their reiterating thoughts. The review was handled by Lyla, Matt, and Poyraz, with Lyla completing three and both Matt and Poyraz one. There are two reviews of note in this section, our round three review done by Lyla and our final review by Poyraz. Part of our success in round three is definitely attributed to the score that Lyla received here, a 7.63, the highest score in any category that team USA had earned at any point in the tournament. This was a review of Giant Sounding Plate which is about what causes the sound to be produced when a large thin sheet of material is shaken while being held on either side. The additive points that team USA built onto the discussion between Macao and Sweden had is responsible for the score that Lyla earned here. Finally in the final part of the final fight Poyraz got the chance to show off his scientific prowess. There is a low probability that every person will be able to get to present during the five rounds as there are five team members, we even crunched the numbers on this at one point to see. But through a series of unfortunate events Poyraz had never had the opportunity to oppose a fight either. In this round Poyraz got to give the review for Ping Pong Rocket, this problem is about how a ping pong ball placed in a cup of water when dropped will be launched into the air to a much higher height then it was dropped from. His review of this problem gave him the highest average score on the team, the second highest review score, and the third highest score overall that we had received during the tournament.

Team USA produced on of its best performances in a long while during this tournament, and things are only looking up as there are two members of this years team still eligible to compete next year, Poyraz and William. With the knowledge that they demonstrated this year and the familiarity with the tournaments that they gained through this competition team USA is only set to grow in performance next year. One wish that I know is held by all members of this year's team is a desire for the competition to grow inside the United States, for more schools to join would be a monumental shift in the way that physics education is viewed here. If you are an interested high-school physics student or faculty member of a school who wants to get involved or compete please reach out, you wont regret it.