The International Young Physicists’ Tournament (IYPT) is a scientific competition between teams of secondary school students. It mimics, as closely as possible, real-world scientific research and the process of presenting and defending the results obtained.

Participants work on 17 open-ended problems for nearly a year before the competition. A large portion of the problems involve unexpected phenomena that are easy to reproduce but challenging to explain.

The aim of the solutions is not to calculate or reach “the correct answer,” as there is no such notion here. The Tournament is instead focused on participants designing and performing experiments, and then drawing conclusions based on the outcomes.

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 on the roles of reporter, opponent and reviewer and are evaluated by an international jury.

The beauty of the Tournament is that 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 paths are legitimate and teams are judged according to the comprehensiveness of their investigations.