Amusement With Physics

I learned from an NPR report today on Day to Day (by Robin Sussingham) that around the country there’s a nice combination of physics and fun going on in various amusement parks! You can hear the story here. From the website:

roller coasterPhysics students in Utah recently attended an event where they learned about concepts like acceleration, velocity, magnetism, and centripetal force.

But this was no boring science fair: It was Physics Day at the Lagoon Amusement Park, north of Salt Lake City. The kids tested theories by riding roller coasters and dropping raw eggs from the towering Sky Coaster ride.

One Utah high school that takes part in “amusement park physics” reports that it now needs three full-time physics teachers to meet growing student interest.

(“Boring science fair”. The cheek. Science fairs can be fun! Anyway, moving on…) It’s an interesting report. It’s been going on for some time, and this event is organized by the Utah State University Physics Department. I also found a report in the Deseret Morning News by Tammy Walquist, which was quite informative. (Photo above by Laura Seitz, of Jessica Rocha (left) and Shelese Sheffield, Kaysville Junior High eighth-graders, is from the article.) An extract:

The main point of the activity is to increase interest in physics and give students hands-on experience, said event organizer JR Dennison of the USU Physics Department. “We want to get students excited and interested in science and technology,” he said. Students could participate in six different contests, from designing the logo for next year’s Physics Day T-shirts to building a model roller coaster to reading the G-forces at different points on the Colossus Fire Dragon.

Further:

Students participating in the Sky Drop rode across the park on the Sky Ride to drop a container with an egg inside to the ground in hopes of hitting a target and keeping their egg from breaking. Kirstin Nielsen, 13, and Kelsey Hunziker, 14, spent two days making a Styrofoam ball they purchased from a craft store into an insulated egg container. They cut strips of foam to put around the ball, padded the inside area where the egg would sit with cotton balls and used two bungee cords to hold the top on. “I thought it was going to break,” Nielsen said. She was overjoyed to discover it didn’t. “I learned to drop if after passing the target because it goes behind you.” Across the park from the Sky Drop, Courtney Turnbow, 17, of Westside High School in Dayton, Idaho, rode on the Colossus Fire Dragon three times to try to get a reading on her hand-held accelerometer to measure different points of G-force on the coaster. “It’s interesting to find out where it’s the most (because) it’s in different places,” she said.

Sounds like fun, and a really good educational idea! I’ll admit that I can’t decide whether I’d prefer to be safely on the ground designing the roller coaster, or on the real one doing the measurements while being tossed around at high speed. How about you?

-cvj

Bookmark the permalink.

10 Responses to Amusement With Physics

  1. Kea says:

    I’m going to go on a hike real soon now and put the photos up on my blog.

    I look forward to that! Funnily enough, since I live near the US Antarctic base, many of the Americans I meet are from up that way. I would love to get there sometime.

  2. Carl Brannen says:

    I’m “VP Engineering” for a very small company that sells very big used industrial equipment. We collected together the stuff to build an ethanol plant. It has a grain elevator that can empty one of those 110 car trains in 10 hours. I’m quite afraid of rickety towers with rusty ladders so I always snap pictures of me on ’em.

    Moses Lake is in central Washington. Without irrigation, it would be part of the great American desert: sage brush and tumble weeds. In the self picture you can see the edge where the rape field ends and the desert begins. The region has a remarkable combination of hydrology, sunshine, and climate that make it perfect for irrigated agriculture. The water source is the very pure Columbia river (glacier and snow melt). The soil has incredibly good drainage so it doesn’t build up salts. Grant county has the US record for corn produced per acre.

    The Cascade mountains are some of the most beautiful in the US. I’m going to go on a hike real soon now and put the photos up on my blog. The locals are paranoid about influencing too many people to move here.

  3. Clifford says:

    Ah… such fields are a common sight on train journeys in the UK! I miss seeing them… where did you see yours?

    -cvj

  4. Carl Brannen says:

    I used to regularly buy toys like marble rolling assembly sets to amuse my fellow engineers at various companies. It typically turns into a challenge to see who can make the most amazing thing during lunch. Hot shot engineers are quite good at that sort of thing.

    And today I saw my first field of rapeseed. Now I’ll know it when I see it. It’s the source of canola oil.

  5. Yvette says:

    Sorry Clifford, I was dead-set to be an astronomer ever since I was 13 years old. 🙂

    Though as far as “programs which influenced Pittsburghers to become scientists” go, I shall direct your interest to the Westinghouse Science Honors Institute, for which hundreds of high school students wake up to attend Saturday morning lectures focusing on physics/engineering, sometimes driving hours and accross state lines for the chance to do so- http://www.wecnq.com/Community/WSHI/ Probably one of the best things to happen to me in high school as far as learning science goes, and I can’t tell you how many students got jumpstarted on science/engineering as a result.

  6. spacewriter says:

    This is fun! We did something like this when I was in high school physics and went to an amusement park. Not quite as detailed, but lots of fun.

    Also, the Issaquah High School physics department (Washington State), has a physics scavenger hunt. (Link to abstract: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006AAS…209.5901H). The teacher described it at a press conference at the Seattle AAS meeting last January.

  7. Clifford says:

    Wise… I think that the word you’re looking for is “wise”… not “old”…. 😉

    -cvj

  8. Supernova says:

    Hey, I took high-school physics in Utah and never got to do this!

    Oh, wait a minute… that was more than 17 years ago. Damn, I’m getting old.

  9. Clifford says:

    Hi! Thanks. Oh no, I did not mean to imply that it was new at all. The fair described above is their 17th annual one, for example. I think that the NPR reporter knew this too. It is just nice to hear about it, that’s all. I’m glad to hear you were a participant…. would you say it helped put you on the physics path, or were you already firmly on it when you went?

    -cvj

  10. Yvette says:

    I didn’t know you hadn’t heard of these Clifford, else I would have told you! In Pittsburgh it is a rite of passage that every physics student gets to have free admission on “Physics Day” towards the end of the year to Kennywood, the local amusement park. The physics teachers are ultimately in charge of what the students need to do before going off to have fun, but the standard is to fill out a worksheet on a particular ride (working out the angular velocity for the merry-go-round, the stresses on a particular roller coaster, etc), and then do 3 Fermi problems. (“How many pepperonis are used on the pizzas in the park every year?” “How many trash lampposts are there in the park?”) Good times had by all, and it’s not unusual for the rest of the summer to overhear teenagers trying to outdo others with their knowledge by saying “guess how many seconds of freefall the Pitfall goes through every year?”

    Anyway, moral of the story is that Physics Day in Pittsburgh has been well-established as long as I knew what physics was, so it’s nothing really new. We just don’t make as big a fuss about it as others, I guess. 😉