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The IYPT is one of the two World's largest physics competitions.
It is a team competition.
The IYPT quite an old competition,
it started in Russia in the 1980s,
and then became international.
Nowadays it has such countries as Sweden, Germany, China, Taiwan...
Almost 30 countries participated in the last competition.
I think it is really exciting that every year you get 17 major open problems you can do research into.
These problems are open, and you can spend a lot of time on them,
unlike these 10-minute problems from textbooks.
These are some of the most exciting things I have encountered as a teacher.
What makes the IYPT problems special is that there is no real solution to them.
They are very open.
When the competition is over, the jury does not offer 17 solutions to the problems.
Instead, it is more like the real science: each country reaches their own answers.
If some problems might have an accepted solution, then you find those.
But on many problems, you sometimes find completely new things.
Sometimes people even publish the new results they have found.
That is where IYPT is very different from other physics competitions.
It is easy when you have a lab task to do in school and see what should be done.
But when you get one of these problems, you are not really sure where to begin,
and what should you measure.
It is very similar to how you work in real research.
Since first you look through the literature and see what people have done,
and then think about what is important in the problem.
If you do this as a project course for example, you can work with the students in small groups.
They get to start with brainstorming around what happens: can we understand it?
And this physics is really cool!