TOFI in Indonesia

TOFI in Indonesia

Working together with the ministry of Education we conducted selection processes in much larger scale spanning across 27 provinces in Indonesia. Around 1400 students took part in the preliminary test organized in October. Subsequently 24 students were selected. They received several books and study materials several months before the next qualifying round. Afterwards they were invited in Febuary to take the next qualifying exam in Jakarta. The top 6 students were picked from the result.. We chose a very conducive place near mountainside to conduct the intensive training camp. The students seemed to enjoy the place very much. The isolation of the training camp also provided less distraction to them. Apart from that, they seemed to develop a better diet as they gained an average weight of 3 kg. Every week they were given a five hours test, or sometimes it might take up to ten hours. The result from the 1995 Olympiad was very encouraging. The team returned with one silver, one bronze, and three honorable mentions from Australia.

In 1996-1998 the physics Olympiad was getting more popular. Many students showed their keen interest to participating. We saw a positive trend where more rural students managed to enter the final qualifying round and even being selected into the core team. It was a certainly good outcome of the TOFI activities as typically the education standard was quite poor in rural Indonesia. It was very important to give these bright your scholars a good opportunity to excel despite their economic disadvantages. Some top local universities offered direct admission to our top eight students. It had been a very appealing incentive to the students as the admissions to the Indonesian national universities was extremely competitive.

In that period the results seemed to dwell on bronze medals and honorable mentions. As we were keen to further improve the result, we had identified that one of the weakest point was in the experimental exam. So far none of our student could score more than 70%. Therefore in 1999 we paid special attention on the experimental training. We were fortunate to have a group of energetic TOFI alumni that helped in preparing the experimental training. They set up a series of 30 challenging experimental modules fora two weeks training program. The effort was eventually paid off. In the 30th IPhO Made Agus Wirawan, the gold medallist, broke the TOFI record by obtaining 17.6 (88%) out of 20 points in the experiment. There was an increase of 10% - 15% for evey student compared to the previous years performance. The team returned with one gold, one silver, two bronze medals and one honorable mention making it the best finish ever.