What things do i need to learn for BphO

hey guys,
I am in y12 and am planning to do some BphO challenges, olympiad round 1 and the computational challenge. What new content is useful to learn for these competitions early as I am only at the start of the AS physics course and my teachers are teaching it quite slowly.
Thanks

Reply 1

Harik0

ok so to preface this, i got gold in computational challenge, pretty high on a2 challenge, and expect to get tg in r1 which i just did so yk where my reference point is.

Computational Challenge - For this, it is probably a good idea to learn excel and python (mainly matplotlib) pretty well. In terms of the theory, the competition is quite long and it walks you through the theory needed slowly so that's not really an issue.

Challenges - From my experience, these will probably be doable using only the content you've learnt to that point (senior physics challenge and physics challenge), and if you're prepping for r1, these should be a breeze in relative terms.

Round 1 - The first thing is to cover the content, if you want to do well, I'd recommend being a bit ahead. IsaacPhysics has some great questions and if you work through those and make sure you understand the topics that come up in r1, you can then just practice past papers, since that will help you most (e.g. there are some techniques that are hard to think of, like that needed for the last part of the last question of Physics Challenge this year). In terms of the actual content needed, the key stuff is: circuits, motion in general (newton's laws, forces, kinematics, collisions), Gravitational Fields, Electric Fields, Circular Motion, EM Induction in theory but not really + also being good at integration and algebra, which is embedded within these problems. You get a lot of choice with r1, mainly in section 2 but kinda in section 1, so you don't really need to know all of it, but you will need it for a lvl anyways so might asw learn it.