This semester, SYP (School for Young Physicists) kicked off its 8th season in style. In September, the main topic was military physics, and the session was very special. For starters, the topic garnered great interest from students, and a capacity number of 320 (!) students attended, which was a monumental increase over the previous record of 250 people. Managing such a large crowd is a great challenge, but our organizing team did a splendid job in making sure everyone was attended to.

However, this was not the only extraordinary thing to happen – after the popular lectures, the experimental part had students doing all kinds of military related things, for example – decoding messages and working with electronic sonar detectors, but the main attraction was shooting with paintball guns and analyzing the trajectory of the paintballs experimentally and theoretically.

For the last in-depth lecture we had a representative from the Latvian Army and two Canadian army officers – one a PhD in physics – who gave lectures about their everyday work and the role of physics in it. This event caught enough attention that the Army sent over a reporter crew to film the entire process, which was a first for SYP.

After the first session, attendance rates remained very high, stabilizing at 250 attendees for every session until December. In later sessions, we looked at radioactivity and nuclear physics, at chemical physics and at thermal physics. In all cases, students learned something outside of the school curriculum. Highlights include a popular lecture introducing students to the topic of quantum physics in chemistry and an experiment with colored ice cubes visually demonstrating the effects of convection in a glass of water.

This semester, our team has not only facilitated the ever-growing sessions in Latvia’s capital, Riga, but also slightly expanded our reach across the country. Previously, we only held sessions in Valmiera, Kuldiga and Ventspils, but now a new city has joined the fold – we will also hold sessions in the regional center Rezekne.

The schools that we’ve visited thus far have all shown willingness to continue to work together, and have asked if classes for younger students than Grade 10 are available. As a consequence, our team also occasionally hosts tailor-made sessions for the younger students, involving them as well.

We’ve also done numerous projects that are directly not connected with our sessions – our team has constructed a physics prop (a large scale wave pendulum) for a TV show and taken part in creating exhibitions for museums (specifically, an interactive stand about the working principles of a light bulb, a phone and communications systems). Slowly but surely, SYP is garnering a reputation for being able to present physics in an interesting, educational and simple manner not only to high school students, but to people of all ages and walks of life.

Altogether, the first semester of SYP’s 8th season has been a record-setting one, and we look forward to keeping the upward trend going in 2018.

Every year, Riga Young Minds section figures out a new direction in which to grow our School for Young Physicists project – this time, we began expanding our efforts beyond traditional sessions with lectures and tried building physics workshops at various events – such as town fairs, festivals and summer camps for children, even briefly appearing in a TV show.

Once the season ends in May, we have free time during the summer, and it can be put to good use. Our workshop activities especially ramped up towards the second half of summer 2016 – numerous towns invited us to fairs, we took part in the extreme sports festival “Playground”, appeared on a TV quiz for school students called “eXperiments”, took part in a project that merges humanitarian arts such as song and poetry with the precision of physics, and much more. In these workshops, we take a step away from our typical format, focusing more on the fun one has doing experiments and trying to raise interest in physics by way of the wow-factor. For this reason, we built gadgets such as a huge slingshot and assembled a spud gun.

The workshops appear to have been a success, as we received more and more offers to host our workshops as the summer rolled on and transitioned into autumn. With the beginning of our school year season, these activities have toned down in intensity, but nevertheless happen from time to time. The second semester promises more workshop activities and physics demonstrations, as the yearly TV show will take place again in the spring season and a few other projects take place.

During the 7th season of SYP, Riga Young Minds section has continued to expand our efforts to bring physics education to areas that are further from the capital of Latvia. In addition to the destinations we visited in the past season (Valmiera, Kuldiga and Ventspils), we’ve added another large city to that mix – this year, Liepaja, our most southwestern city, has joined the fold.

A variety of topics have been presented – sometimes, topics that have yet to premiere in the capital have test runs, other times, well established (and improved) topics are chosen. Across various cities, lectures on topics such as astronomy, acoustics and forensic science have been given.

Even if the topics repeat in different cities, the approach is often different, because the audience is different – in Kuldiga, it a smaller group of high school students, but in Ventspils, for example, it is a larger group of grade 8 – 9 students. To make the experience as entertaining and valuable as possible, we try to tailor each session to the audience that we’re visiting.

During this semester, the SYP team has visited Valmiera three times, Kuldiga twice, Ventspils twice and Liepaja once. Our aim is to continue holding sessions in these cities in the second half of the school year as well, and plans for adding sessions in another city are in the works.

This season marked the seventh anniversary of the main project of our YM section – the School for Young Physicists (SYP). Each month, around 200-250 students from schools all over Latvia gather in the University of Latvia for an entertaining Saturday and to learn some extracurricular physics.

Sessions are held each month, each with a different theme. Every session starts with two popular lectures, 40 minutes in duration, held by physics students of various levels in University of Latvia. In these lectures, topics that generally are not discussed in school are presented in an entertaining manner. Thereafter, participants take a 30-minute break and are treated to a lunch with sandwiches and tea. Then follows the practical part, in which students themselves put the things they’ve just learned to the test. Afterwards another break is held in which students are again treated with food, this time with sweets such as chocolate and cookies and tea. Lastly, a professor or a specialist in the topic is invited for a more in-depth lecture.

A competition called the “School cup” is also held during the season, in which teams of 5 students representing their school do creative tasks assigned to them to come out victorious. Eternal glory and different prizes await for the winners of this competition. This season, 15 different teams are rivaling for the School cup.

On September 24, the seventh season was kicked off with a session titled “Mythologics” in which we discussed how using relatively simple knowledge of physics one can evaluate the plausibility of different claims.

On October 15, the second session of SYP took place. This time, the physics of sound was the topic, and the session was titled “With a physical undertone”.

On the November 12, students gathered to participate in the third session of SYP7 which was titled “Transmitted!” and was about radio-electronics.

On December 10, the last session of the autumn semester was held. Titled “Calculate like a star”, the topic for this session was astronomy.

From July 8-10 the members of the University of Latvia Young Minds Section participated in a sports, music and creativity festival named “Playground”. The festival proved to be quite popular, garnering a turnout of a few thousand people. In the festival, our section operated a workshop in which attendants could take part in various physical demonstrations. The workshop attracted numerous people, young and old, most of whom had little day to day interaction with physics and science in general. Some were interested in the physical background of the experiments, while other were content with just witnessing the show.

Highlights of our demonstrations included:

• potato cannons and a catapult which people could use to shoot at pre-made targets;
• bottle rockets which could be launched in the air with pressure created by the release of CO2 from the reaction of baking soda with vinegar;
• a mixture of corn starch and water, which changes its apparent viscosity depending on the way it is handled;
• a demonstration with different color dyes that were placed inside glycerol, then slowly, carefully stirred until they seemed to have mixed. The dyes were then unmixed by stirring the liquid backwards;
• an electronic 1 vs 1 reaction game set up on a breadboard and operated by Raspberry Pi;
• the creation of dense mist by pouring water onto dry ice.

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The School for Young Physicists project that our Young Minds section organizes not only held monthly sessions in the capital of our country this season, but also held regular sessions in other regions as well. Namely, this season we visited schools in Valmiera, Kuldīga and Ventspils.

Regional sessions take place two or three times a semester in each location. Students from surrounding schools are given the chance to attend a free lecture course – usually session topics that have already been tested in our main events are chosen, but sometimes they get a premier look at a new topic that has not yet been presented anywhere else.

Topics discussed this season in regional sessions include, but are not limited to, probability in physics, electronics and wave optics. Students had the opportunity to conduct experiments normally not done in schools – for example, they determined the distance between the pixels in their own smartphones, or calculated the value of pi by dropping buckwheat on a piece of paper.

These regional sessions are educating not only for the students attending – teachers also find inspiration in these non-standard topics and experiments, and materials for use in lessons are often left at schools that are visited for the teachers to use free of charge.

Our Young Minds section views these regional sessions as valuable opportunities for children that live far away from the capital to get a chance for extra curricular informal learning, so we will give our best efforts to expand in this direction next season.

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Along with the school year, the School for Young Physicists has finished its season as well. Nine different, fun and educational sessions took place in the University of Latvia Faculty of Physics and Mathematics on the following topics:

-forensic physics
-energetics
-biological physics
-optics
-centripetal force
-electronics
-statistical physics
-liquid physics
-elementary particle physics

Each session was attended by an average of 150 students from different schools of Latvia who arrived to listen to popular science lectures from physics students, conduct some fun experiments and learn from the very best in lectures given by professors and specialists of the field.

A season-long competition was also held – the School Cup. To contend for it, students were tested on their knowledge after every session and also had to make videos of different topics as homework. Their work was graded after every session and a scoreboard was kept and regularly updated. The competition was tough but in the end the first place was awarded to the Riga State 1st Gymnasium team “Nucleus and Electrons”. The top teams and individual performers were awarded with gifts from our supporters.

The team of School for Young physicists also visited the best regional schools in Latvia for external sessions. We visited Valmiera State Gymnasium, Ventspils 1st State Gynmnasium and Kuldīga Gymnasium, thus offering the children to attend the sessions without having the need to travel the long distance to Riga. You can read more about it here.

All the materials and reviews can be found at www.jfs.lv

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