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Fisidabo is an educational project aimed at promoting critical thinking among students. Under the framework of this project, and motivated by the ubiquitous qualitative analogy between spacetime warping by massive objects and the deformation of a rubber sheet to explain general relativity, a group of engineering physics students have undertaken a study of the movement of a small ball on a trampoline bent by the presence of a heavy mass in its centre. As the literature states, similarities between how masses move under warped spacetime and under a bent trampoline are only qualitative. Some observed analogy flaws are described which can be useful for teaching general relativity. Triggered by the failure of this analogy, a complete study of the movement of particles in a bent rubber sheet is developed. Several models to describe such trajectories and the resulting shape of the trampoline are proposed. Most importantly, a fitting routine to obtain the parameters needed for the description of the real trajectory is presented. The high accuracy between optimised and real trajectories recorded by a video camera implies that the model is able to explain the experimental behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amusement parks are excellent laboratories of physics, not only to check physical laws, but also to investigate if those physical laws might also be applied to human behaviour. A group of Physics Engineering students from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya has investigated if human behaviour, when driving bumper cars, can be modelled using tools borrowed from the analysis of molecular dynamics simulations, such as the radial and angular distribution functions. After acquiring several clips and obtaining the coordinates of the cars, those magnitudes are computed and analysed. Additionally, an analogous hard disks system is simulated to compare its distribution functions to those obtained from the cars’ coordinates. Despite the clear difference between bumper cars and a hard disk-like particle system, the obtained distribution functions are very similar. This suggests that there is no important effect of the individuals in the collective behaviour of the system in terms of structure. The research, performed by the students, has been undertaken in the frame of a motivational project designed to approach the scientific method for university students named FISIDABO. This project offers both the logistical and technical support to undertake the experiments designed by students at the amusement park of Barcelona TIBIDABO and accompanies them all along the scientific process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]