Academic CentreEvery year, students from all over Latvia have the opportunity to participate in the Latvian Open Physics Olympiad (LAFO), organised by the Department of Physics, Faculty of Physics, Mathematics and Optometry at the University of Latvia. The aim of the Olympiad is to stimulate the participants' interest in physics, to promote advanced physics knowledge and to promote opportunities to study in physics-related study programmes.
How is the Latvian Open Physics Olympiad different from the National Physics Olympiad?
Any student studying a physics course in primary or secondary school can become a LAFO participant without prior selection or restrictions on school representation, regardless of their physics performance or participation in other competitions and Olympiads. During the LAFO, participants may use reference materials that do not contain solutions or answers to the problems. Participants can choose in which language to receive the problems and write the solutions: Latvian, Russian or English. The Olympiad consists of two sets of tasks: for students from 9th to 10th grade and students from 11th to 12th grade.
Each group is given ten tasks, one of which is an explanation of a demonstration. The maximum possible score for each of the tasks varies and is indicated next to the task. The points for the explanation and the five other highest-scoring tasks are taken into account in the overall ranking of the Olympiad, regardless of how many tasks the participant finished during the Olympiad. The choice of tasks allows participants to demonstrate their strengths and, if they have not yet learnt a topic at school, to choose to solve a task on a different topic.
Previous years' assignments available on the LAFO e-course.