Identifying Amusement Park Physics Curriculum Enhancements for USU Physics Day at Lagoon

To enhance the educational benefits for secondary students attending USU Physics Day at Lagoon, extensive web-based STEM curricula have been developed to support activities both during Physics Day and in the classroom before and after the annual one-day event. We report on our evaluations of 12 years of teacher surveys and educator recommendations to identify the most sought-after and effective enhancements to the Physics Day contests and curriculum including improvements for physics topics and content, effective and teacher-friendly lesson formats, ties with standard curriculum objectives, and incentives. USU Physics Day is one of the Intermountain West region's oldest and largest STEM outreach activities (https://physicsday.usu.edu/). Held annually at Lagoon Amusement Park for the last 32 years, it has in recent years had annual participation of \textasciitilde 10,000 students and \textasciitilde 600 teachers from over 130 high schools and middle schools. Amusement park physics accesses associative learning situations, and utilizes hands-on activities to apply basic concepts studied in physics and physical science classrooms; it also instills excitement about science by focusing on myriad real-world examples of physics principles so ideally demonstrated at an amusement park.