Students Jake, Jacob, Edward and Tom made the annual trip to York for the Physics Olympiad. The event took place at St Peters School York, where the students had to compete against 34 other schools from across the country.
The day consisted of 5 tasks and a Fermi quiz. To highlight how difficult the quiz was, an example question – How much is the mass of air currently above the county of Yorkshire? Or another one – How many handcuffs would you need to cover the same distance the Moon travels around the Earths orbit in 2 days?
You are probably thinking – ‘can you say that again’. Yes the questions were as hard as these, and worse!
The five tasks involved the boys working together to build solar boats and a paper tower to hold a cream egg. They were also asked to build an electromagnet for paper clips, a plastic boat to hold marbles and to work out the mass of a cuddly toy using the principle (only covered at A-Level Physics) of Simple Harmonic Motion. Wow!
It was a great day and the students did the school proud. They competed in all tasks and came third in one of the tasks.
Overall we were positioned 20th out of the 35 schools involved. A valiant effort from ‘The Oldest State School in the UK’.
Well done boys!
Mr Scott