View the 2009 Physics Day Photo Gallery

By the time the sun set on Utah’s Lagoon amusement park May 15, more than 100,000 people could claim the title “USU Physics Day Alum.” Among them is Becky Atkins who attended Physics Day some six years ago while a student at Idaho’s Twin Falls High School.

Atkins chose to attend Utah State University because of a full-ride scholarship she earned at the event as a Physics Bowl contestant. Now a high school math teacher, Atkins earned top honors just a month ago when she graduated with a master’s degree from Utah State. She was named Scholar of the Year two years before, when she earned a bachelor’s degree from USU.

This year’s Physics Day marked the 20th anniversary of an event that has become a spring rite of passage for scores of Intermountain teens. More than 6,000 middle and high school science students from Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Nevada transformed Davis County’s überplayground into a giant laboratory to explore such basic physics concepts as gravity, projectile motion and centrifugal force.

“What better laboratory to entice young people than an amusement park?” says J.R. Dennison, USU physics professor and a founding organizer of the event. “Physics Day motivates students’ interest in science and relates abstract concepts to familiar examples in a fun way.”

Initiated by USU’s Physics Department, Physics Day is coordinated by USU and partners Idaho National Laboratory, Lagoon and the Rocky Mountain NASA Space Grant Consortium. Participation, sponsorship, activities and prizes for the event have steadily grown during the past two decades. For the past 15 years, the day’s top academic competitors have received four-year scholarship offers to USU, and thousands of dollars worth of prizes provided by corporate sponsors have been distributed to aspiring scientists.

Dennison notes that Physics Day is one of the most cost-effective tools in USU’s mix of recruitment strategies for sparking teens’ interest in university study and propelling them toward the pursuit of degrees in science, engineering and math.

“Our annual operating budget for the event is about $3,500,” he says. “That works out to about 60 cents per student.”

Dennison is quick to add that students pay their own way to the event, for which Lagoon provides a generous discount, and schools provide teachers, chaperones and transportation. A volunteer army of hundreds of USU faculty, staff and students, along with corporate partners, coordinate the day-long extravaganza. Lagoon provides lunch for the volunteers and free passes for teachers and chaperones.

"Lagoon deserves a lot of the credit for our success, as well as the teachers and schools that support their students' participation in the event," he says.

New to this year’s Physics Day was attendance by elementary students from several schools participating in a “Lego Mindstorm” design competition sponsored by Boeing and Wal-Mart. Also new to this year’s event was the “FIRST Robotics Idaho/Utah Grudge Match” between student teams from the two states. Robots constructed by the teams competed to solve an assigned problem in the least amount of time.

This year also marked the first “day after” event for teachers. Educators from throughout the Intermountain region gathered May 16, at USU for the day-long science outreach workshop “Outreach: The Roots of STEM.” Secondary teachers, USU educators and industry partners brainstormed on ways to develop effective programs to attract students to “STEM Ed” – that is, higher education and subsequent careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

“We gathered K-12 and university teachers with corporate partners to look at the big picture beyond Physics Day,” Dennison says. “We talked about the critical attributes of outreach, evaluated our current outreach efforts and discussed ways we can work together to be more effective.”