Page 29 - Journal 2018B FINAL

Dr Matthew Verdon, ASMS
The Asian Physics Olympiad is a competition between high school students from the Asian and Australasian regions.
It brings students together in the spirit of friendly competition in physics and has been running since the year 2000. Participants have the chance to form networks; learn about
other cultures and education systems; and challenge themselves at a high academic level.
Adelaide has been fortunate to be selected as the host city for the 2019 Asian Physics Olympiad.
In a first for Australia, the competition will gather 200 of the region’s most outstanding and brightest secondary students from
25 countries to Adelaide for nine days of academic competitions and cultural activities from 5-13 May.
The event will be organised by Australian Science Innovations in partnership with UniSA, University of Adelaide and Flinders University, and reaches out to the physics community across the country to ensure a high quality academic competition. It’s a great opportunity to showcase South Australia and South Australian education to this number
of enthusiastic students of physics from our region.
To get involved with the Olympiads, students must be selected through a national competition.
In Australia, the first stage is the Australian Science Olympiads Examinations, held in August each year. 24 students are selected through this process for an intensive summer school and from there eight are selected for the Asian Olympiad team. This year, there was a strong response from South Australian teachers to the call to get involved with this exam, resulting in a significantly larger number of entries from South Australian schools and the process of selecting students for the summer school is currently under way.
During the Asian Physics Olympiad, there
are a few opportunities to get involved. Local volunteers will be needed to assist both with the logistics and with some of the academic work such as marking papers. For the logistical side, if you have recent students who have had an interest in science, would now be over 18, have great organisational skills and you think would make great guides for some teams of international students, let them know that the event is on and to look out for calls for expressions of interest.
If you know students from a little longer ago who went on to study physics, it would be great to get in touch with them and ask them to keep their eyes open for the expressions of interest to be academic volunteers.
Number 02 / 2018
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