USAYPT

The United States Association for Young Physicists Tournament (USAYPT) is an international contest consisting of four problems that are discussed in a debate style known as “physics fights.”

This year, seniors Elina, Vivek Bharadwaj, Jessica Zhu, and junior Manan Shah will present the team’s solutions for the problems about building falling dominos, creating a vacuum lifter, validifying an electronics property, and bouncing a laser beam.

To solve these problems, team members split them up into several components, tackling each with a combination of computer science, engineering and theoretical and applied physics.

“[After we took pictures of the laser’s bounce], Elina worked with a couple of freshmen to write an image processing program that would convert those pictures into a plot of points and we would run that through Vivek’s program to get the actual result,” Alice said, referring to one of the team’s solutions.

Alice believes that extracurricular research is driven primarily by student interest.

“I think with all research, especially in high school, there is a lot of self motivation,” she said. “If you want to do it, you have to really push yourself and manage your time.”

In the past five years, Harker has placed first in the competition three times and placed second once.

The contest will be held on Jan. 29 and 30 at Randolph College in Virginia.