The Aftermath

After one crazy fun 24-hour day, we decided to start our classroom session a little later in the morning in the interest of sleep - but not before making a run to Starbucks!

Our group enjoyed some much-needed caffeine before picking up where we left off on our discussion of the physics of attractions in Disney World. We tapped into our calculus knowledge to find the position, velocity, and acceleration that many of us experienced multiple times yesterday, particularly on the infamous Tower of Terror. Unlike our calculus classes, however, we studied how to find integrals and derivatives when data is not continuous, and how to tell how far off an estimate is for a given sampling rate.

Epcot Traveling Tourist Problem

Now that we can say that each of us has visited Disney World on one of its most crowded days, we can truly appreciate the value of minimizing wait times. Earlier in the week, we collected data on average travel times between some of our favorite attractions in Epcot, and we used the day to analyze our data and start building an optimal route through the park. We spent lunch at Panera, splitting up into groups to examine the various ways to calculate these pathways. Our many mathematical methods included compiling a cohesive chart summing up optimal routes between data points by hand, developing a computerized algorithm to expedite this process, and utilizing a map application to show the estimated travel times.

Magic Kingdom

After the Panera run, the class headed back to the hotel to make plans for the next stage of our main project : creating optimal routes for navigation through Disney's most iconic theme park and the host of last night's 24-hour events, the Magic Kingdom. The Magic Kingdom is much larger than Epcot, and its structure is much harder to graph than Epcot's. To make sure we handle the Magic Kingdom as efficiently as possible, we created three committees - one to decide how we will graph the park, one to use Map My Run to find distances between the nodes, and one to design an algorithm to find a short path around the graph.

After a full day of work, most of the group was ready to relax. Some rested at the hotel, and a small group went to Downtown Disney to get Ghirardelli ice-cream and wander through the Disney Store.

Stay tuned, because over the next few days we will be building our master plan for mapping the Magic Kingdom, putting each of the methods we used today to use in constructing our largest map.