First Online Physics Olympiads between United Russian-American High-School Teams

Abstract
The article is dedicated to the twentieth anniversary of two Internet physics olympiads organized by the Physics Department of Novosibirsk State University, in which senior pupils from Russia and the USA participated. For the time when before the advent of popular social networks there were a few more years when the currently popular messengers were not yet widespread, the organization of such competitions was technically and organizationally far from a trivial task. It was also necessary to overcome the problem of different programs and different levels of school physics teaching in Russia and the USA, as well as the problem of the language barrier. All these tasks were successfully solved by the joint efforts of the Russian and American organizing committees, and in 1999 the competitions Novosibirsk – San Diego and in 2000 Novosibirsk – St. Petersburg – San Diego – Seattle were held. A successful invention that allowed equalizing the chances of teams and replacing interethnic rivalry with cooperation was the idea to hold competitions between international teams, consisting of an equal number of Russian and American schoolchildren communicating with each other via direct video communication. Sets of tasks were prepared for the olympiads, both ordinary, written, and video clips with tasks-demonstrations. The latter have been particularly successful in resolving the problem of the language barrier. The great help in conducting these two Olympiads was the many years of experience gained by NSU during the All-Siberian Olympiads and the idea of the demonstration tasks used in entrance examinations at the Physics Department of NSU. We present in this article both the content of the tasks of the Olympiads and the responses of the domestic and American press to the events described.

Keywords
physics teaching, physics olympiads, tasks on physics
УДК 372.853

First Online Physics Olympiads between United Russian-American High-School Teams (RUS)