International Young Physicists' Tournament

The International Young Physicists' Tournament (IYPT) , sometimes referred to as the “Physics World Cup”, is a scientific competition between teams of secondary school students. It mimics, as close as possible, the real-world scientific research and the process of presenting and defending the results obtained.

Description
Participants have almost a year to work on 17 open-ended inquiry problems that are published yearly in late July. A good part of the problems involves easy-to-reproduce phenomena presenting unexpected behaviour. The aim of the solutions is not to calculate or reach “the correct answer” as there is no such notion here. The Tournament is rather conclusions-oriented as participants have to design and perform experiments, and to draw conclusions argued from the experiments’ outcome.

The competition itself is not a pen-and-paper competition but an enactment of a scientific discussion (or a defence of a thesis) where participants take the roles of Reporter, Opponent, and Reviewer, thus learning about peer review early on in their school years. Discussion-based sessions are called Physics Fights and the performances of the teams are judged by expert physicists.

Teams can take quite different routes to tackle the same problem. As long as they stay within the broadly defined statement of the problem, all routes are legitimate and teams will be judged according to the depths reached by their investigations.

The IYPT is a week-long event in which currently around 150 international pre-university contestants participate.

IYPT is associated with The European Physical Society (EPS) and in 2013, IYPT was awarded the medal of The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) "in recognition of its inspiring and wide-ranging contribution to physics education that has touched many lives and countries, over the past 25 years".

History
The International Young Physicists' Tournament (IYPT) originated in the former Soviet Union and expanded internationally in 1988. Following its European roots, the tournament expanded globally, with the first non-European event held in Brisbane, Australia, in 2004. Participation has since grown to over 38 countries, representing every continent.

Over time, the IYPT has transitioned from a community initiative to a formally registered corporation. National organizations now organize qualifying competitions and represent their countries within IYPT committees, with many receiving official recognition.

Tournament structure
The most important structural parts of the IYPT are the Physics Fights. There are 5 Selective Fights, and one Final Fight for the top teams at the end. The structure of these Fights can be compared to the group phase of a football competition (e.g. FIFA World Cup).

Each fight consists of 3 (or 4) Stages. In each Stage, every team in a given Fight room has one role of the following: Reporter, Opponent, Reviewer, and Observer (if there are 4 teams in a Fight). During the 3 (or 4) Stages, they "rotate", so that every team has all the roles exactly once, represented by the following tables:

The following table represents the structure of a single Stage:

In the last Selective PF and in the Final PF the procedure of challenge is omitted.

Timeline table
(*) the number of Nations can be disputed as some countries were midway towards a recognized independence