Aguascalientes, Ags., November 29, 2022.- Panamericana students will attend the International Young Physicists Tournament(IYPT ), in which they represented our institution, in addition to acquiring a great international experience, since the tournament was held in Romania.
World Physics Tournament
This is a scientific competition between teams of high school students, which tries to imitate, as much as possible, the process of scientific research in the real world and how the results obtained are presented and defended . The students who participated are Victoria Daniela de la Mora Rosales, María Fernanda Morales Méndez, Kevin Adrián Campos, Estefanía Lee González and Diana Laura Garza de la Riva.
Victoria Daniela, team captain, comments on her participation: "The experience I acquired and the knowledge implicit in it are skills that no one will be able to take away from me, I managed to work under pressure and with little sleep to be able to give my best in the contest".
Skills to be developed
Being an international event, the students had the opportunity to develop several skills, both in engineering and in many other subjects. Among them is the use of the English language, which, as an official language in this type of event, it is essential that the young people strengthen it in any opportunity they have.
"This makes them want to make more effort in the use of the language, since the contest is entirely in English," said Luis Alfonso Guerrero Rodríguez, professor of the School of Engineering. "It was a very enriching experience for them in the cultural aspect by meeting people from many other countries." He adds that this knowledge of the predominant language is the fundamental one that the students must learn.
In addition, within the academic aspect, learning is not left behind. Problem solving is greatly exercised within the competition, since it is not only reduced to trying to solve an equation or a setback, but it is the students themselves who are in charge of creating the dilemmas.
Luis Alfonso explains that, "these are issues that they have to design, study, project, experiment and draw their own conclusions. All by their own hand. In addition to acquiring knowledge from other teams, since it is part of the tournament to dialogue with the different participating countries to learn how they solved the issues, and thus create a collective knowledge".
The goal of solving the exercises is not to be able to calculate or to arrive at the supposedly correct answer, because in this contest they claim not to know this notion. The tournament is entirely aimed at drawing conclusions, since the main objective of the participants is to design and conduct such experiments. A good argued conclusion, drawn from the results obtained from the experimentation, is what is ultimately desired.
What the young people, future inventors, were able to strengthen in this stay is the experience of seeing that there are many routes, with many differences between them, to address the same problem. All these routes are legitimate and the research is what counts. This type of learning is what the university is looking for in its students: create your own route, while learning from the knowledge of others.
