Traverse City Central's New 'Ride Lab' Uses Skateboards to Teach Physics, Business Skills

What if the most effective physics classroom isn’t a classroom at all, but a skate park? This fall, Traverse City Central High School is experimenting with that very question.

Brett Derr is one the teachers behind the Ride Lab, a brand-new double-block course at Central that combines physics, business, marketing, and advertising. In the past, Derr has taught those subjects as separate classes. Then, last year, Central’s head principal, Ben Berger, approached him about coming up with a hybrid that could meld the seemingly disparate academic disciplines into one.

The Ride Lab was born, a class that uses board sports to teach the principles of physics. To bring the business and marketing aspects into play, the Ride Lab is also challenging students to develop their own boarding brand – complete with logos, merch, mission statement, company values, and a custom ready-to-sell product – by the end of the school year.

This fall, Derr and his 30 Ride Lab pupils have been making frequent pilgrimages to the nearby Civic Center Skate Park, for a real-world crash course in how physics works.

“All those classic mechanics in physics come into play naturally when we're thinking about board sports,” Derr says. “Skateboards, snowboards, and surfboards all fit really well into the ideas of simple machines, linear motion, acceleration, velocity, projectiles, and collisions.”

While revolutionary in a lot of ways – Derr says only about 60 schools in the country are doing something comparable – the Ride Lab is also an evolution of tried-and-true physics curriculum. For instance, Derr says one of the most foundational lessons in any high school physics class is the carts and ramps lab, which teaches the fundamentals of velocity, acceleration, and linear motion. The Ride Lab has “just amplified that” into a real-world experience.

“Instead of the wooden ramps and little demo carts that we use in the classroom on the lab bench, we're using skateboards and the ramps that are available over at the skate park,” he says.

The tweak makes things more exciting for students, but isn’t giving them an easy way out, Derr assures. In truth, doing a physics lab at the skate park is more complex than doing it in the classroom.

“There's a lot more problem solving, because the variables have increased,” Derr explains. Instead of a basic ramp that is identical for every student, the skate park offers a variety of ramps for students to use. Whichever one they pick, they have to measure the height and width of the ramp, the “hypotenuse” of the ramp’s slope, and even the impact of things like cracks in the concrete. Those variables then get “plugged into our kinematic equations to understand how the board is accelerating,” Derr says.

Students are also testing and comparing multiple different boards for the project, which complicates matters further.

“The students are timing, they're measuring, they're collecting the data, and then they're calculating all of these different elements, trying to explain the motion of the board down a ramp,” Derr says. “That’s all right on track with what our other physics students are doing, but it’s a fun twist on it, because it shows the students a very practical application of the science. Usually, if they're out skateboarding or driving a vehicle, students are not consciously thinking about the physics involved with that that motion. But after participating in the Ride Lab, they probably are thinking about those things.”

That emphasis on real-world learning is a growing piece of the puzzle for TCAPS, according to Central Assistant Principal Nate Kepler.

“We’re looking at school a little bit differently, and trying to engage students that may not otherwise engage,” Kepler tells The Ticker. “That’s not the only focus here, because we know we have kids in the Ride Lab that do want to take honors physics or enroll in AP classes in the future. But ultimately, the hope behind things like this is attracting all different levels and kinds of students.”

If the goal is getting students excited about coming to school, it’s working. In the spring, Derr says there was a ton of buzz around the building about “the skateboard class.” He even had students coming up to him a day or two before summer vacation, telling him how much they were looking forward to the Ride Lab.

“To have a student, in the last week of school, excited about coming back to school in September – well, that’s pretty much unheard of,” Derr laughs.

Students are also excited about how the course will evolve throughout the year. While the fall is focused on skateboards and longboards, the curriculum will progress to snowboards when winter hits and then move to surfing and watersports in the spring. That seasonal flow allows for a natural progression of the difficulty curve, because “a surfboard build is a lot more complex than a skateboard build,” Derr says.

Students will also move from testing boards to building their own, with an eye ahead to the Ride Lab’s end-of-the-year capstone: an open-to-the-public event where they’ll present their own boarding brands to the public.

“We’ll open up the garage doors at Central’s innovation and design center and invite the community to come check out our year's worth of work,” Derr says. “We'll have the boards we built on display, and then we’re thinking food trucks and live music, too. That event will be part of the students’ second semester marketing credit, so they’ll be in charge of doing everything, from finding sponsorships, to booking bands and lining up the food vendors, to promoting the event. It’s going to be a gigantic team project, and it will put all our creativity on display for everyone in Traverse City to see.”