Science a Roller Coaster Ride

Friday, December 8, 2006

Page 15

AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)

Science a Roller Coaster Ride

BY J’AMY PACHECO

There’s a roller coaster in my living room. That can only mean one thing: it’s science fair time again.

I’ve been saying that every year since my fifth grader was in first grade and decided to germinate seeds with unusual liquids, like milk, and ended up not only stinking up the house, but bringing home science awards from school and district competitions.

She’s repeated that success each February. One year, she and her partner managed to win a “spotlight” award, which meant they got a prize from the district without even having to show up.

I don’t know how I managed to give birth to a scientist. Frankly, I’m not sure I even took any science classes after junior high, when I had to dissect a frog.

(As luck would have it, my amphibian croaked — so to speak — with a full stomach, which turned my dissection into a “gather ‘round, students!” event. It’s been decades, and I still remember that stink.)

I never entered a science fair. I’m not even sure they HAD science fairs when I was in school.

When I said good-bye to science, I never dreamed I would one day be funding experiments, driving around with plants in my car, or standing in a home improvement store watching my child survey strangers about their perspectives of models of castles.

You heard right — I said castles. Even before she could write, my daughter decided she was going to be a Disney Imagineer as soon as she grows up and graduates from the USC School of Engineering. With that career goal in mind, she has, since third grade, endeavored to make her science projects Disney-related.

Two years ago, she and her partner built models of Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty’s Castle for a research project on forced perspective. Last year, my daughter did a research project about animation, with emphasis on Disney’s use.

This year, she decided to tackle a project that nearly caused my heart to stop: a research project on audio-animatronics. You know — like the moving, talking, singing pirates in “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

Since I am of absolutely no use to her knowledge-wise, I offered my only applicable skill: I charged a robot kit on my credit card. Day after day, she labored over circuit boards and plastic parts trying to assemble something that would move.

But then, we discovered this year’s fair would take place in December, rather than February. That gave my future Imagineer less than two months to put something together – hardly time to build a pirate.

The robot was put aside for next year, and my daughter decided to study theme park rides with big drops. More specifically, she wanted to know why some rides require passenger restraint (the seatbelt kind, not the self-control kind) and others don’t.

This sounded pretty simple, until I stood at the bottom of a ramp catching different sized doll cars as they came barreling down. I was assigned this task after the dolls inside survived the drop unscathed, only to be involved in a horrific pileup when the car crashed the bottom of the ramp.

Not only was my job painful to my fingers, but my daughter, and I by association, soon learned that everything we thought about roller coasters and drops was wrong.

In science, that’s a good thing. But I’m not a scientist; I’m a source of funding. And this discovery meant my little experimenter wanted to build a roller coaster to demonstrate what she’d learned.

It was no problem finding a kit. Unfortunately, the model for which directions were given would have ended up taller than me, which wouldn’t do for an elementary school science fair. My daughter is instead designing her own coaster, which means there are parts and pieces everywhere. (Hopefully, none have yet made it into my vacuum cleaner.) The deadline is just around the corner, and the coaster isn’t working yet.

It occurs to me that science fairs are a lot like roller coaster rides – up and down, scary, and a little bit nauseating. I’ll be glad when this one is over and I can have my living room back.

Of course, there is always next year, and the matter of that little robot waiting in the wings. But it could be worse — at least he’s not a frog…

That would really stink.