RESEARCH OF NEW FORMS OF COMPETITIONS IN FOSTERING THE CREATIVITY OF YOUTH

People working in basic science are rightly concerned about a potential decline in the number of physics students. At the Faculty of Science, Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic, we have prepared a project entitled „Research of new forms of competitions in fostering the creativity of the youth aimed at motivating them to study science, especially physics, mathematics and chemistry“. Some of the research activities will be discussed in this paper, namely the competitions Fermi Questions and The Young Inventor. The basic question of our research is the efficiency of these activities for the motivation of students to study physics and techniques. It will be shown that only a small number of students were interested in these competitions. The Fermi Questions competition was organized as an international one in cooperation with secondary and high school teachers in Germany in 2008. The results are the same as in the Czech Republic. The competition The Young Inventor was successful – the presented papers and the convention had shown a good quality of students´ knowledge, some of them cooperate with industrial enterprises and intend to study physics.