British Physics Olympiad

Throughout this year students have been taking part in the British Physics Olympiad and we wanted to summarise some of the wonderful successes that have taken place this year.

The Olympiad is a problem-solving paper which takes students subject knowledge and pushes it beyond the curriculum. We open this up to Year 11’s (Intermediate), Year 12’s (Senior), Year 13’s (Challenge) and finally the Physics Olympiad itself which we offer to our most able Year 13’s.

Our Year 13’s were the first students to take part in a challenge this year and we had some wonderful success with the following students achieving the following:

Iris – Merit

Anya – Merit

Fynn – Merit

Alice – Pass

Mary – Pass

Leila – Pass

Iris continued her Olympiad journey by competing in Round 1 of the competition achieving a Top Gold result  placing her in the Top 150 students in the country out of 3000 and allowing her through to round 2.

At the start of March we completed both the Intermediate and Senior challenges with continued success in both. The intermediate challenge was completed by 10 of our Y11 Students in a paper consisting off Waves, motion of balls made of different materials, two-dimensional momentum and charging and discharging of batteries. Our students achieved the following:

Kavya – Bronze 2

Anoushka – Bronze 2

Iliana – Bronze 1

Bea – Silver

Sofia – Silver

Emma – Bronze 1

Alba – Silver

Jemima – Bronze 1

Alisar – Bronze 2

Isadora – Bronze 1

The students should be very proud of their results on a paper which people nationally found very challenging.

Our second challenge in March was carried out by 17 of our Year 12’s. Students faced some questions on Relativity, energy transfer via lightning, heating effects of toasters, building pyramids, the difference in sunsets for a lion and giraffe and finally working out how many water molecules in a cup of tea was consumed by Julius Caesar. The students did very well with the following results:

Becky – Gold

Leo – Bronze 2

Yicong – Silver

Ryan – Bronze 2

Henry – Bronze 1

Emma – Bronze 2

Aania – Bronze 1

Pratigya – Bronze 2

Amelia – Bronze 2

Livy – Bronze 1

Christina – Commendation

Freya – Bronze 2

Arthur – Bronze 2

Callie – Gold

Thomas – Gold

Adrian – Bronze 2

Charlotte – Bronze 2

Callie, Becky and Thomas should all be extremely proud of their respective 27, 30 and 31 marks out of 50. This puts all these students in the top 6-7% and in the top 215 students who had participated this year.

Finally, Iris completed the second round of the Olympiad, a paper which included general physics questions, the physics of flight, colourful transparent materials, and questions on fluorescence. Iris achieved a bronze result in Round 2, the furthest one of our students has got to in the Olympiad, so a massive congratulations to you Iris.

This has been a wonderful year for all our students in Olympiad competitions and we hope to continue this into next year.

Well done all,

The Physics Department