Share the stage with a Nobel Laureate

Year 7 to 11 students from around Australia have the chance to present their work at the 2012 Australian Institute of Physics Congress in Sydney on the final day of the congress, 13th December.

As the Australian Institute of Physics Congress approaches, they have launched a competition for Australian high school students that will allow the winner to talk at the Congress, and collect $1,000.

Student Experiment Competition—Share the stage with a Nobel Laureate, and win $1,000.

Students will investigate a physical phenomenon of their choice and write up their research for evaluation by a panel of judges. The overall winner will get a prize of $1000 and will be invited to present their research as the warm-up act to 2011 Nobel Laureate Professor Brian Schmidt’s public lecture at the Congress. All accepted entries will feature in a UNSW poster session and up to 10 runners-up will have their posters displayed at the national conference, with the two best posters receiving $500.

Suggested Experiments:
• Original Research, if you can think of a good question
or, experiments to answer an interesting question of their own choosing. The following list is just to suggest that there are many such questions:
• Why is the sky blue? (model experiments would be fine)
• Why are the front brakes on cars bigger than the rear brakes? (model experiments would be fine)
• What gain can be achieved with a simple acoustic telescope?
• How much has the visible face of the moon changed/moved since Galileo? (Your observations)
• How does a plane (or a bird or a bee) fly? (model experiments fine in all cases)
• How does rotating a magnet about various axes, including that of symmetry, affect its field and the Faraday emfs produced?

Up to five students can be in a team, but only one person from the winning team will be invited to give the talk.
Students must register their interest by 15th October with submission due by 15th November. For more information, tips, an experiment report template and other information visit:

www.phys.unsw.edu.au/phys_schools/high-school-physics-competition.htm