Youths Turn Amusement Park Into Laboratory

Bill Baggelaar ignored the hordes of screaming people and concentrated on clicking off his stopwatch the moment the cage stopped moving.

It takes about two seconds for the Six Flags Magic Mountain ride known as “Free Fall” to end, long enough for some people to turn green. But Baggelaar, an 18-year-old student from Grant High School in Van Nuys, calmly disembarked and calculated the velocity of the ride at 44 m.p.h.

By the time the amusement park closed, about 7,800 other high school students from all over the Southland had participated in this exercise or others as part of the park’s seventh annual Physics Day. John H. McGehee, a physics teacher at Rolling Hills High School in Rolling Hills Estates, conceived the recent event as a way to demonstrate free fall, centripetal acceleration--the force that keeps a train from leaving its tracks on a curve--and other physics principles usually taught in the classroom.

“You actually get to see it all work, that’s what’s great about it,” Baggelaar said.

Teaching Via Roller Coaster

Although physics textbooks have always featured questions about amusement park rides, teaching science via roller coaster did not become popular until recently, McGehee said. Now students in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and other states also are learning physics firsthand, he said.

But students from Arizona are stuck in classrooms because there are no amusement parks there, said Robert Pack, a physics teacher from Amphi Theater High School in Tucson. That’s why Pack brought 23 of his students to Southern California to join in the activities.

In addition to problem-solving, many students participated in the Physics Olympics, a series of six contests that tested their ability to apply what they had learned in school. For instance, during the Fermi Quiz--named after Enrico Fermi, the Italian physicist who produced the first nuclear chain reaction in 1942--students were given 15 minutes to answer 12 questions.

Answers could be given only in powers of 10, and students were allowed to use calculators. The short time period was designed to get students to take what they know and build on it quickly, said Jim Centorino, a teacher at El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills.

Stefan Zager, 17, a senior at El Camino Real, had no trouble with the question, “How many waves hit La Jolla pier per year?”

“I figured there was at least one wave per second, about 60 per minute, so that means about 3,600 per hour or 86,400 per day,” he said. “Multiply that by 365 days and you have more than 10 million, but less than 100 million, so I put down 10 to the seventh power, or 10 million.” His answer was marked correct on the test.

All that in just over a minute per question.

Students in the Powered Transporter contest had a little more time. Their task, done at home before the event, was to design and build a miniature car powered by a No. 10 rubber band. Students were free to use materials of their choice, but the car had to carry a 2.2-pound weight and travel in a straight line. The car that traveled the farthest won.

The contest, part of McGehee’s crusade to inspire future scientists, is his favorite, he said. When two of his students, Jeff Bower and Jeff Kaufman, both 18, tied for first place with Ben Hsu, 18, of Eagle Rock High School, McGehee was ecstatic. Hsu’s car looked like a drag racer, but Bower and Kaufman’s was made of two 78-r.p.m. records, a metal bar, a roller-skate bearing and string.

But McGehee’s face fell, and he screamed, “No! No!” when Bower and Kaufman said they planned to pursue careers in business.