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About amusement park physics in Sweden

A journey from small student project to large-scale events.

The picture to the left describes the development from a project for about 30 students, over development of www-pages for others to use, to supervised class visits during science festivals, to large-scale events. (Click picture for enlargement)

Throughout the years, we have used as many possible ways as possible to evaluate and revise the structure and materials as a design-based research project.

A number of articles have been published presenting the physics involved, but also about teacher roles and student projects, e.g. student investigations of roller coaster loops and different designs of student assignments.

Participation in physics days and edutainment days

The picture to the right shows the development number of participants in physics days /edutainment days in Sweden. Read more about the history of the project.

This www site is developed and maintained by Ann-Marie Pendrill, who has a background in computational atomic physics. Since 2009, she is the director of the Swedish National Resource Center for Physics Education, located at Lund university, where she was appointed professor in Science communication and physics education 1 Jan 2015. 

Contact

Ann-Marie Pendrill has used amusement park activities in education since 1995, both for her own students in science, teaching and engineering programmes. Read more in her blog and in her articles about using amusement parks and playgrounds in education. She has arranged a number of physics days and has written a number or articles relating connecting Physics Education to amusement rides, including a conference paper on Teacher roles in amusement parks.

She has developed student assignments for many types of rides, (as well as more detailed assignments for most of the rides at Liseberg and many of the rides at Gröna Lund and some other parks, although mostly in Swedish) 

Ann-Marie attended the EAS 2016 in Barcelona 20-21 September (and the safety institute), as well as the EAS2018 in Amsterdam. 

She would love to discuss and share experiences, and ideas about educational uses of amusement park, in particular in support of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering Math) teaching. 

She wears Liseberg rabbit ponytails during physics days at Liseberg and sometimes during conference talks.

The safest way to get in contact is to send an e-mail: Ann-Marie.Pendrill@fysik.lu.se