The New Zealand Young Physicists’ Tournament is a researched based Physics team competition open to all New Zealand students studying NCEA level 3 Physics, or another advanced Physics examination courses, in New Zealand.
The Tournament is organised by the New Zealand Young Physicists’ Trust, registered charity CC62496. Through the tournament, the Trust aims to:
- Encourage real world skills in critical thinking, problem solving, team work and genuine experimentation for Physics students
- Provide a fun physics competition between schools (“a bit like debating, but there’s a point to it”)
- Select and train a team to represent New Zealand at the International Young Physicists’ tournament. This will be in Lund, Sweden in July 2025.
Introducing the 2025 New Zealand Rep Team
Congratulations to the students who won places in the 2025 New Zealand Representative team travelling to Sweden next month.
The team, are
Alan Chen – St Kentigern’s College, Auckland
Audrey Kung – Queen Margaret’s College, Wellington
Jason Tao – Westlake Boys High School, Auckland
Julia Sung – St. Cuthbert’s College, Auckland
Kayden Liu – Kristin School, Auckland
Emily Viggers – Wellington High School, Wellington (reserve)
Also in the picture are alumni and team leaders Daniel Shi(Poland 2019) and Eric Coufmann (Singapore 2017). Thanks to our sponsor Jane Street for the T–shirts. The team will leave for Sweden at the end of June. We wish them the best of luck.
And the 2025 New Zealand Champions are….
New Plymouth Huia!
A combined team from New Plymouth’s Boys’ and Girls’ High Schools won the national title. Congratulations to Oliver Marsh, Charlie Herbert and Rayna Kim guided by teacher Dr Kerry Parker.
This year eighteen teams, from twenty schools competed over three rounds of physics matches at Auckland Grammar school. Our thanks to all our wonderful judges. The medalists are
Gold – New Plymouth Huia
Silver – St Cuthbert’s College 1, Auckland
Bronze – Queen Margaret College, Wellington and Kristin School, Auckland
We had a couple of firsts:
- For the first time the young women won more medals than the young men.
- For the first time we had teams with members from different schools – including our winners!
- For the first time we had a tie for a medal place with Queen Margret College and Kristin School, sharing the bronze medal.
Now we move onto selecting the rep team. Twelve students have won places in the “possibles” squad and are rapidly researching a new problem. On Sunday 13th April they will all present their solutions to the Trust. From this our team of five new Zealand Reps will be chosen for the International Tournament in Sweden this June. Watch this space!
ACCELERATE!
Alumni Amy Cui was in the last pre-Covid team that competed in IYPT Warsaw in 2019. Read how her engineering work still uses the pressure drop concepts she presented in Poland.
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