APS News

June 2011 (Volume 20, Number 6)

Six Flags Physics Day

Egg-streme Sport

Six flags web lge
Photo by  Matthew Payne

On May 13, Six Flags America held its annual physics day, hosting hundreds of middle- and high-school students from around the Washington, DC area. APS was there too, together with its partners, the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) and the American Institute of Physics' Society of Physics Students, to organize the event and provide fun physics experiences for the students, using the roller coasters and other rides at the park. New this year was an egg-drop contest, in which 35 teams vied to engineer the best device that would prevent an egg from breaking when dropped from an upper-storey window. In the photo, Melissa Lapps of AAPT gingerly displays one of the failed attempts, as some of the participants look on.