The history of the International Astronomy Olympiad

The International Astronomy Olympiad (IAO) was founded in the 1990s as an annual scientific educating event for students of the junior high school classes. Starting from 4 teams at the 1st event in 1996 the Olympiad includes more than 20 countries nowadays. The style of the problems of IAO is aimed at developing the imagination, creativity and independent thinking. They stimulate the students to recognize the problem independently, to choose a model, to make necessary suppositions, estimations, to conduct multiway calculations or logic operations. The Asian-Pacific Astronomy Olympiad was founded as a ``daughter'' (``affiliated'') olympiad in system of the International Astronomy Olympiad in 2005.