More than 380 high-school students representing 82 countries traveled to Vietnam in July to compete in this year’s International Physics Olympiad. Many took time to sightsee in Hanoi and around the countryside. “The experience in Vietnam was great … and the Vietnamese [people] were very hospitable,” says high-school physics teacher Robert Shurtz, co-academic director of the US team. The US students, who were jointly sponsored by the American Institute of Physics and the American Association of Physics Teachers, also blogged their experiences at http://aapt-physicsteam.blogspot.com, telling of encounters with students from other teams and posting photos of their excursion down tourist-favorite Ha Long Bay.
The 39th olympiad, however, was not all fun and games. Medals were at stake for experimentally determining the efficiency of a solar cell and explaining the theory behind the mechanics of a Vietnamese water-powered, rice-pounding mortar. The theory question stumped many of the students and caused...
