Angels Shine at UBC Physics Olympics

Our team shattered the glass ceiling, proving that LFA girls can compete toe‑to‑toe with the biggest schools in the arena of mechanical design, engineering, applied science, mechatronics, and programming—all essential skills in this year’s competition. Our strongest performance of the day was a 2nd‑place silver medal in the pendulum launcher event after competing against 83 other secondary schools.

The UBC Physics, Astronomy, and Engineering Physics (PHAS) faculty has hosted this event for 48 consecutive years. In mid‑December 2025, UBC PHAS provided a rulebook outlining two pre‑build challenges. Each secondary school team used the same rulebook to design and build their devices before bringing them to UBC to compete. This year, teams were tasked with building a pendulum launcher capable of harnessing the energy of a swinging pendulum to launch a hacky sack as far as possible. The second challenge required teams to design a pole‑climbing robot that could climb a 150‑cm PVC pole. It had to ascend the pole, detect the top, stop, and then descend without hitting the bottom. Changes in acceleration had to be minimal, as did vibration. These were measured by a sensor. The two pre‑build projects were divided into many smaller tasks, each pursued by a smaller student sub‑team. These sub‑teams had to collaborate and communicate constantly to coordinate their designs toward the larger goal. For example, the frame and wheel of the pole climber depended on the choice of electric motor.

Students found these challenges exceptionally difficult: UBC gave them only a set of rules, with no rubric, no sequential instructions, no explanations, no sample completed projects and no clear direction forward. There were countless possible solutions to each challenge. Pursuing an idea for weeks without knowing whether it will work is an uncomfortable experience that most students rarely face. UBC Physics Olympics is not a typical school project where last year’s examples exist and the path from start to completion is linear and clear. Each year, the challenges are both exceptionally challenging and completely different. In the pole climber challenge especially, the team had to abandon weeks of work multiple times after realizing that a long‑pursued idea simply would not work. Yet it is precisely this discomfort—combined with the pressure of competition—that fosters teamwork, builds true resilience, and fuels genuine growth. Among the many hands‑on skills they developed, students learned in real time how to push ahead when nothing was working, how to lean on your team for support, how to fail fast and fail often, how to welcome failure as a launchpad to success, and how to continually seek incremental improvements that add up to greater achievements.

This is LFA’s 10th consecutive year participating in UBC’s Physics Olympics. Our performance was not the result of luck. We learned long ago that depending on luck is unreliable because luck swings both ways. Instead, students deliberately engineered luck out of the equation by refining their machines to perform predictably and reliably. Consistently placing within the top 5–10 teams in the pre‑build events and within the top 20% overall out of 70–80 competing schools has become our norm. Mr. Chow’s role was to keep students safe, teach skills, and advise—but not to direct. Mr. Chow ensured that students were solely responsible for all non‑safety‑related decisions and hands‑on work so that any success they realized would be entirely their own. As long as safety was not compromised, it was important to allow students to make bad decisions and see the consequences. When students lacked skills, they simply had to learn and practice them—quickly. No one saved us. No one gave us accommodations. No one gave us extra time. No one went easy on us. Students competed on equal ground and square footing with all other teams. This particular group of students has proven that LFA girls can succeed and compete in this domain of applied science and engineering if that is their desire.