YOUNG scientists at a Forest school have earned more than 50 awards in a national physics competition.

Students from Wyedean School in Sedbury won three golds, 15 silvers and 38 bronzes in the British Physics Olympiad.

Two of the three golds were won by students who are at the school as part of the Afghan resettlement programme.

Some 150 students from Years 10, 11 and 12 took part in the Olympiad.

Students could choose to either do an experiment or take a computer-based test of knowledge.

They were challenged to measure the “slingshot” effect of a football on a tennis ball which were dropped together.

The slingshot effect is used by scientists to alter the course or speed of spacecraft using the gravitational pull of nearby bodies such as planets.

Student Zach Rusling explained: “They gave us a basic investigation that we could carry out by dropping a football with a tennis ball attached and then measuring how high the football would kick the tennis ball back up.

“They gave us that brief to model the gravitational effect and then we had to make our adaptations to the the brief.

“They give some brief idea of what the experiment should be, but no specifics, so you've got to work out, how to make it precise.”

The teams dropped the balls six different heights between 15 and 40 centimetres in increments of five centimetres, repeating the procedure three times, said student Madoc Ford.

Zach said if the effect had been perfect the tennis ball would have bounced nines the height of the original starting point.

The highest the ball went in the Wyedean experiments was 2.5 times the initial height.

That was due to issues such as air resistance or the effect on velocity if the ball did not bounce directly upwards.

The students filmed the experiment and also had to take into account the “parallax error” with the camera.

The parallax error is the apparent shift in an object’s position caused by a change in the observer’s standpoint.

The observations were then written up in a in-depth report in which the students explained how they had set up and run the experiment, the trends they found and what had gone wrong.

Students could also take one of two online tests answering around 30 questions including the history of physics, the work of famous physicists and the theories with which are related.

They were also presented with equations and asked to answer questions about them.

his theories and and then where would you use this equation or they'd give you an equation.

Physics teacher Clarissa Yeh said taking part in the competition boosted students’ confidence with some deciding to continue to A Level as result of their experience in the Olympiad.

Her colleague Chris Jones said the competition also helped students who were looking to get on highly competitive physics courses at university where competition is intense.

The school has been taking part in the Olympiad for a number of years.