2020 Explorer

Physics Unlimited's 2020 Explorer Competition consisted of an open-ended assignment to write up a mock paper developing a model for orbital resonance for two weeks in late January to early February 2020. We received 20 teams' submissions from around the world and were impressed by the high quality of work.

The assignment details and results are given below, and links to a subset of contributed papers will be published on this page once we receive permission from teams who would like to make their submission public.

Assignment

• Developing a model for orbital resonance

Scores and ranking

• List of submitted teams' papers with relevant awards

Details

Assignment

The .pdf of the assignment is accessible here. This year's assignment was an open-ended invitation to build a model for orbital resonance and draft a paper based on several requirements and guidelines. The submission deadline was February 3.

Besides the submissions by teams' point-of-contact represntative, all individual team members were asked to submit a form with a few brief questions, both to ensure and confirm how they have each contributed to their team's effort and to help us understand what each student learned from the creative experience.

For any content-related questions during the competition, competitors were able to use the Piazza platform.

PUEC 2020 team rankings

The .pdf of the team rankings is accessible here (updated with honorable mentions, special awards, and team members' names on 3/31/2020 [v2], 5/25/2020 [v3]). The online distribution of personalized individual certificates and awards has been completed for all participants who took the individual post-submission questionnaire.

Please note: the global pandemic has affected our operations as well; we are temporarily short-handed but are doing our best to go through the queue of our to-do list items as expeditiously as possible.

Submission stats
We received a total of 20 final team submissions from approximately 80 students across the world. Each team was comprised of up to a total of 6 high school students.

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We hope this paper-writing exercise has served as an enriching experience for everyone, and we look forward to seeing all participants develop their skills further!

Please see this Explorer Competition root page to view the assignments and results from previous years.