Please have a modern browser (Firefox or Chrome) and a stable internet connection, i.e. no LTE access.

We will use the video conferencing software BigBlueButton. If you have the opportunity, please familiarize yourself with it.

You will need a decent web-cam, minimum 720p resolution and a good quality microphone.

The preferred team size is five members. It is possible to participate with as low as three team members. Please contact the organizers if you wish to participate with fewer than five members.

Otherwise, the rules of the IYPT regarding participants apply (e.g. age, country of origin, ...).

See below for the possibility of registering another team from the same country.

Each team selects five problems from the 17 IYPT problems that they will present at the competition. Each team's selection is published once the competition starts.

The opposing team may challenge the reporting team on any one of their five pre-selected problems that has not yet been reported by the reporting team and has not yet been opposed by the opposing team. If no problems are left to be challenged, the latter rule is discarded and any problem not yet presented by the reporting team may be challenged. It is the opposing team's responsibility to follow these rules.

There are no restrictions on which team member does the opposition in the preliminary fights. This means that one person may do the report and the discussion in the same fight, and even that one person may do all discussions. In the finals, problems are selected by the teams themself and all roles must be done by a different team members. Procedure will be like at the IYPT (select after fifth fight, with best team having first pick).

It is possible for countries to register up to two teams each, according to the following rules.

1. The students per team must be different
2. From the 10 combined pre-selected problems of the two teams, only one may be selected twice (i.e. you need to prepare nine unique problems in between the two teams). Any solution to a problem selected twice will be reviewed specifically to prevent plagiarism.
3. In case of organizational constraints, first all primary teams from all countries will be allowed to participate at the OYPT and remaining spots are filled by lot from the secondary teams.
4. In the finals, only one team from each country may participate. That means the finals will be held between the best three countries and possibly not the best three teams.

To compress the schedule into a weekend and reduce the load on all participants, the selective rounds (PF1 - PF5) will take place without a reviewing team.

This means that in each room, there will be only 2 teams competing. A reporting and an opposing team. In the second stage, both teams change their roles. In the case of an odd number of teams, there will be one room with three teams, where the third team acts as observer.

The timing in each stage is as follows

The best three teams of the selective physics fight will compete in a final. In the final, the role of the Review (as in IYPT) will be added. The following review stages will be inserted after the summary of the discussion by the opponent.

This results in a total of 82 minutes for the stages for the final.

The draw will be done via a committed permutation. The sha256 commitment is

 7396e249af7a09f208b5dd5aeec4427d9eba9e73b3361d2414fd22c69782911b

Running a video conference with participants around the globe might come with technical difficulties. As the report is the central part of a fight, we require each participant to upload a recorded presentation at latest one week before the opening (AoE) to a web space. The link to the upload space is visible to team manager on the team management page.

This recording will be played in case of unexpected technical issues preventing the reporter from presenting their presentation live.

No, as this might lead to unfair advantages in either direction. You are however welcome to send different students from your national selection as if they were a secondary team (see above).

Even though the OYPT is an online competition, it was decided that teams may not use internet based presentation tools. The use of internet is restricted to what is necessary to participate in the fights, i.e. the IYPT CC based BigBlueButton rooms.

If your team will not be gathered in one place to participate at the OYPT, your team may have an additional voice/video chat in place for team-internal discussion. No other person outside the team members (not even for technical support) may be present in such an online chat.