I mentioned earlier about the "Sum of All Thrills" at Innoventions East at Epcot. This is something that I highly recommend people to do. It at least tries to incorporate basic mechanics into the design of your ride, so one would hope that while having fun, people will actually learn something, even something minuscule.
This is what you see when you approach the attraction.
You go into a briefing room where they tell you something about how to design your ride. You can choose from 3 different types of rides - a bobsled (tamest), a roller coaster, and a jet fighter (most challenging). Even within each ride, you design how the ride goes (i.e adding loops, spirals, drops, etc... The bobsled option does not give you any ride segment that makes you go upside down). So you get to design how tame or how exciting your ride will be, but with the use of basic mechanics such as conservation of energy.
Each ride can take 2 people, and both of you share one ride card, which they give as you enter the briefing room.
After the briefing, you walk into the ride design area where you go to a large screen that you've been assigned to, stick your card in, and off you go. It gives you a screen of your initial condition, i.e. how high are you going to start from your first drop and how much potential energy you are starting with. That will dictate how fast you can go around corners and how high you can design other ride components that you wish to add along the way. All of the information is stored on the card.
After you have finished with the ride design, you take the card out and then walk over to the ride loading area. This is what your ride vehicle looks like. It consists of 2 seats at the end of a long, robotic arm.
The hood over the seats drops over you after you are seated and completely covers your upper torso. Note that if you suffer from claustrophobia, this may be a problem for you because initially, it does feel a bit confined. Still, what you see in front of you is a screen of what you will be facing in your ride, and at a lower corner of the screen, you get to see a live video of your partner sitting next to you (and he/she can see you as well). So in this case, it might not be as bad.
After the loading platform moves back, you are off on your designed ride.
[PLAIN]http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/3844/img8304t.jpg
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The ride simulation feels pretty accurate. The upside-down loops truly feels as if you are going upside down. There is also not much in terms of motion-sickness, so the coordination between what you see on the screen and what the arm is doing is quite accurate.
This is one of those attraction that consciously tries to inject basic mechanics with some fun. So in that sense, it is worth doing. You also get to keep the card and log into the Raytheon webpage (they're the sponsor) to play their online game, etc., and learn more about mechanics. So the education/fun aspect continues even after you get home.
Zz.
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