Young physicists’ tournament and regional cooperation

International Young Physicists’ Tournament (IYPT) started 31 years ago as the only competition on inquiry problems. It confronts secondary school students with open-ended problems involving phenomena which are not difficult to demonstrate but require nontrivial efforts to explain them, to explore how they depend on relevant parameters, to propose hypotheses and to check them. The competition itself is formatted as a scientific discussion and this requires concise and clear presentation of the results, as well as sharp arguments during the discussion itself. Neither on problem-solving skills, nor on scientific competences could Balkan countries boast about their results in PISA assessments. In view of this one may argue that there is a need for a broader introduction of inquiry problems in our schools. This could be done in many ways and IYPT offers exemplar problems of this type for everybody to use. A lot of countries are reluctant about taking the step to initiate national Tournaments and send teams to IYPT because they find the unusual format of the competition difficult to master and quite often there is a lack of understanding what the jurors’ criteria are. With that in mind, a sort of a demonstration Tournament, together with a simultaneous Workshop, was organized in Sofia this April, encouraged by the project Open Schools for Open Societies of the Horizon 2020 Program for Research and Innovation. The aim of the event was to acquaint the Physics community in the region with the IYPT, to motivate much more teams to participate in it and to help improve their results. The feedback received is encouraging and organizers foresee follow-up Tournaments with participants from more Balkan countries.