State Fair Shows Students Physics At Work

For some South Carolina students the State Fair is more than a midway or a smorgasbord of fried treats — it’s a classroom.

More than 2,500 students from 60 high schools across the state attended the 14th annual R.L. Childress Midway Physics Day Tuesday morning. The event, put on by the USC Physics Department, used hands-on activities and real world applications to spark interest in a science often overlooked in the state.

According to an American Institute of Physics study released in July, called the Science and Engineering Readiness Index (SERI), South Carolina ranked 40. The assessment is based on physics and calculus and factors in 2009 national assessment scores, Advanced Placement Test Scores, teacher certification requirements and class enrollment. While the state’s percentage of high school students taking physics was only slightly below the 37 percent national average, AP test scores in both subjects were below average.

But in the physics day tent, those standings weren’t apparent as students wiggled long metal coils, dipped balloons in liquid nitrogen and twirled like tops whiles standing on an oversized Lazy Susan and holding a spinning bicycle wheel.

USC Professor and director of the undergraduate physics department Dr. Jeffrey Wilson said that the goal of the event is to show students that physics can be fun and to inspire teachers with new experiment ideas.

“Its fabulous when you can actually go play with something and it connects with what you’re learning in the classroom, then it’s a real world event,” Wilson said. “When kids do these demos, now the question is ‘why does it work like that?’ They’re more apt to ask that question if they got to play with something first.”

He thinks there’s been a lot of progress in physics education in South Carolina over the past 15 years, but that it’s not surprising the subject takes a back burner to reading and math, which need to be mastered for physics to make sense to students.

While many view student interest as the biggest obstacle to teaching physics, Wilson equates that to teacher preparedness.

“The teachers that are often teaching physics were never trained in physics so they’re often learning physics in the same way the kids are,” he said. “Too often they’re using canned experiments that companies prepare for them, read a script, do this, and they need to learn it themselves before they can really do it with the kids.”

But the event proved an exception to the rule as students got to physically experience the power of physics.

Chapin High School senior Mike Goyda and his friends used a digital accelerometer to graph their speed on the Crazy Mouse roller coaster. He said signed up to take a physics class because he’s always been interested in airplanes and anything that accelerates. But he knows he’s the exception to the rule, and others in his class confessed to taking physics just because of the built-in State Fair field trip. Goyda said that putting students on roller coasters is about the best way to make physics interesting and thinks some will get inspired.  

“It gives the kids a great idea of how physics applies to real life. Some people don’t pay attention in class, but and getting out to do something fun helps high schoolers pay attention,” he said.

That’s good, because Wilson said in order for the state to compete in attracting industry, there need to be more South Carolinians with physics knowledge.

“All of the high technology that you play with and use, it’s all based on physics. So without some knowledge of physics those things are really off the table, you’re not going to get a job in those industries, you’re not going to attract those industries here. And that’s really the fun stuff, iPods and LCD televisions, it’s all based on physics.”

Physicist Paul Cottle of Florida State University, a co-author of the SERI report, noted in a release that even America’s top-ranked state, Massachusetts, would fall short of physics achievement in many Asian countries, including China and Singapore.