Physics teachers have been using amusement parks as laboratories for at least two decades. The earliest report in print is John Roeder's 1975 article in The Physics Teacher. In 1993 student attendance at Physics Days across the country ran to the tens of thousands. In California alone, 10,000 students attended Great America on a single day. Students numbering 15,000 went to Great Adventure in New Jersey, and more than 6,000 went to Valleyfair in Minnesota, and 5,000 to Riverside Park in Massachusetts. Teachers and students may travel several hours each way, but there is a teacher in Texas for whom the nearest park is an annual overnight trip.
At first, the amusement park may seem to be an odd place to do serious work. It is designed for fun and excitement, not study. Yet teachers have come to see it as a natural extension of the classroom. The physics of the rides is the basic stuff of a first-year course. Roller coasters demonstrate the conversion of gravitational potential into kinetic energy, rotating swing rides illustrate the vector addition of forces, rotating rides of all sorts allow for computation of centripetal accelerations, and all of those terrifying falls let the students experience free fall. Having first-hand experience with the forces that come into play helps the students to build an intellectual understanding of the principles behind them. Students who think about and experience physics in the park develop a deeper understanding of the principles taught in the classroom. They demonstrate this understanding by always coming back with original questions. By becoming part of the laboratory equipment, the students experience the excitement of understanding and learning along with the enjoyment of the rides.
We all know how self-conscious teenagers can be; it's one of the scourges of the age. One benefit of the group experience at the park is that because all of the students are doing physics, none of them feels out of place. Working in teams is a realistic reflection of how science is actually done, and the subliminal message is that they can be engaged in an intellectual enterprise, in public, with others, and still remain normal. Getting soaked together on a water-flume ride is a powerful antidote to the elitism which plagues the public image of physics.