FARMINGTON – Checking the seats for the Colossus Fire Dragon roller coaster at Lagoon on Friday was pretty typical, that is, until the ride attendants got to the last train of the coaster where groups of physics students sat with an unusual contraption duct-taped and velcroed to their arms.

As part of Utah State University’s Physics Day, one student explained it as an accelerometer, hand-built by science students, with a magnet inside the thin tube about the size of a ruler, which measured the force of gravity throughout the ride.

Eighth-grader Ben Templin admitted he paid more attention to the instrument than the ride itself as he watched his magnet fluctuate between 1g, what is typically felt standing on the Earth, all the way up to 4gs on the biggest loops, and then the toggling in between g-forces with every twist, turn, and toss of the coaster.

Science teacher Brian LeStarge, from Churchill Junior High School in Salt Lake City, explained as the roller coaster hits the bottom of the hill, then heads back up, the g-forces increase dramatically. “That’s why your head feels heavy as you go through the loops because you are experiencing different g-forces,” said LeStarge.

Other activities at Lagoon included an egg drop from the Sky Coaster, a ride design contest, physics bowl, and a robotics grudge match. More than 6,000 middle and high school science students and teachers from Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Nevada descended into the park for the event on Friday.

Two students who designed a roller coaster for the contest will never ride a roller-coaster again without thinking about what they learned in the process. Jacob Johnson and Zac Johnson, both eighth-graders at Bountiful Junior High,no relation, built their own looped coaster out of leftover aluminum fencing material given to them.

Achieving the loop for a tennis ball to travel though required several hours using metal cutters to shape. The boys also learned about centrifugal force, kinetic and potential energy in the process.

“While we were riding the Colossus, in-between screams, I was thinking about the centrifugal force that was holding me in my seat, and I have never thought about that before today, and will probably think about that every time I ride a roller coaster in the future,” said Jacob Johnson.

That’s exactly what event organizers were hoping for when the event was started 25 years ago.

“We take physics as you are screaming down the Colossus, when your stomach feels like it’s in your eyes, and when you are turning right, but feel like you’re being pulled to the left, and point out to students that it is the exact same concept as Newton’s Law of Motion,” said JR Dennison, USU physics professor, who has been coordinating the event since its inception. “We do our best to provide tools for teachers and students, things they can explain at Lagoon or in everyday life versus boring book knowledge.”

Getting students excited about the USU Physics Day at Lagoon isn’t hard. “If you want to get teenagers excited about anything, tell them to bring a cell phone to an amusement park,” said Dennison, referring to the myriad of science things that can be done with a cell phone these days, such as measuring heights of rides, speeds, and acceleration. “The bottom line is, we are trying to get kids excited about science.”

Dennison admits that some students really get into the competition side of the day, but there are others who just enjoyed the reward of their hard work in science classes during the year. “I had one teacher tell me that if they can announce over the intercom that the physics classes are going to Lagoon, enrollment doubles, and that’s their motivation, but sometimes it just takes a little something out of the ordinary to tweak people and turn them over to science,” said Dennison.