In its first year at the school, the Physics IB class was recently able to take full advantage of experiencing the laws of physics first hand by traveling to iFLY this past Tuesday. There the Physics IB team participated in a class provided by iFLY, followed by a skydiving session in the wind tunnel that actually allowed them to feel the sensation of free falling for themselves.

Fortunately for the students in the IB Physics program, trips like the one to iFLY can better help them gain a comprehensive understanding of the concepts that are covered throughout the year, while also being fun.

“The purpose of the trip is two-fold,” IB Physics teacher Andrew Perrone said. “For one we want the trip to be fun, and I think it will be. The second point is that we’ve been studying objects that are in free fall, and I want students to not only be able to experience falling for themselves and the forces that act upon them when they’re falling, but to actually model those forces.”

The process of traveling to iFLY to participate in free falling will be a new experience for not only the students, but for Perrone as well. This is IB Physics first year at the school, so after multiple years of teaching standard physics, Perrone will now have a fresh start with the new course curriculum that comes with IB.

“I’m having a lot of fun with IB physics,” Perrone said. “A big part of that is because there is more flexibility in terms of scheduling, and more freedom in terms of what I want to focus on in a given day. I have a two-year calendar that I’m adhering to, but that has enough wiggle room so that I can focus on interesting concepts and have a lot of discussions that I usually am not able to have with my Pre-AP classes because there’s not enough time.”

The trip to iFLY seems to have also resonated with the students in the class, as some appear to appreciate the ability to connect what they’ve learned in class to the skydiving.

“So far my favorite part of IB physics has been learning about different forces I didn’t know about before,” junior Bikram Singh said. “Even though for the most part I don’t like the math, we got to learn about how force equals mass times acceleration, and that was interesting. Not only that, but we got to apply that to skydiving itself and other things in the real world.”

The students were also fortunate enough to have iFLY provide them with a course tailored to the physics behind free fall and skydiving. For some students, the classroom lessons actually proved to be just as interesting as floating in the wind tunnel.

“One of the activities in the class was particularly interesting,” junior Matthew Kind said. “We were given calculations so that we could predict our terminal velocity, and later we got in the wind tunnel to actually find out how correct we were. Part of it involved measuring our hands, arms, and feet, and then finding the surface area that would be exposed to wind. It was pretty fun.”

Understandably, even after taking part in the class, remaining level during skydiving still proved to be a challenge for many of the students.

“There was a lot of instability, you had to remain pretty stiff while holding a certain position to get the actual skydiving right,” Kind said. “Whereas the flight instructors could just tilt their hands and that would send them in a different direction.”

Despite this, Kind still has an idea on who was able to control themselves the best during the skydiving portion of the trip.

“Probably Mr. Perrone,” Kind said.