St Peter's York Physics Olympics 2024

On Wednesday 12th June, St Peter’s hosted the 17th annual Physics Olympics competition for Year 8 pupils. Twenty-seven schools took part this year in a day of physics challenges. Visiting schools had travelled from as far away Newcastle, Scarborough and Bolton, having to set off really early for the trip over to York. Schools from York, Harrogate, and Leeds were also well represented.  

The teams took part in a broad range of physics, maths, problems solving and practical skills. There were five different laboratory-based challenges in all, and a very challenging Fermi Quiz. Some of these challenges included:

• Target practice – Setting up a ballista, in order to fire balls at a circular target to score the most points for the team.
• Pluto High-clue – Teams completed some escape-room style challenges to unlock equipment that allowed them to measure the height of the school’s lightning conductor.
• Light-fantastic – Pupils used a diffraction grating and coloured LEDs to work out the wavelength of a mystery LED.  
• Pulling Power – Teams constructed an electromagnet to pick up the most paper-clips.
• In a Spin – The challenge was to make a sycamore-seed style helicopter, which took the longest time to reach the ground.
•  The Fermi Quiz - Requires pupils to estimate various different quantities to the nearest power of 10, e.g. How many footballs would fill the entire Memorial Hall?  

Each challenge had a numerical outcome, allowing the teams to be ranked. Prizes were then awarded for the teams winning each of the challenges, and an overall gold, silver and bronze. All of the pupils got stuck into the challenges right from the beginning and had lots of fun taking part in the challenges.

The winners for the Fermi Quiz challenge who received the Morris Shield for this achievement were Cundall Manor, while the overall results saw Millthorpe School, Bootham School and St Peter's 8-13 in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place respectively!

Mr Parr, Head of Science at St Peter's School shared his insights on the day: "The Olympics involved a huge amount of team work from many colleagues in science and other areas of the school. We also had lots of help from L6 physicists who were superb ambassadors for the school - my thanks go to all of them.  My thanks also go to all the teams who attended this year and their teachers who organised for their visit today, and to everybody who helped to make this year’s competition a great success.” - Mr Parr, Head of Science at St Peter's School.