Every year in mid-April, physics teacher George Stimson hosts a field trip to his home town of Pasadena to give students an enjoyable break from the stressful time of preparing for AP testing. The purpose of this trip? To add to students’ understandings of physics by having them find the height of the bridge and to give the students a new look at a design and art-oriented school of thought at the Art Center School of Design.

The trip involved a two-hour car ride to Pasadena to throw a watermelon off of the infamous “suicide bridge,” the first problem students work out in Stimson’s class. This bridge, which has had over 100 people take their lives by jumping from it, has had a suicide barrier erected in 1993 to prevent further suicides. But that didn’t stop Stimson from hurling a watermelon from the bridge while the rest of us watched it explode on the ground.

After the bridge part of the trip, Stimson took us to the Art Center School of Design, where the college students work on and showcase their works of art and design projects. Before the trip, Stimson told us to ask questions of the artists and designers about their work, and report back to him on what we learned. In the main hallway in the school, there were exhibits of art done by each student of the class, with freebies related to each artist’s works.

In other rooms, there were classrooms where artists and designers worked on their projects, which included a four-rotor remote-controlled airplane, designs for an outdoor bar, and a design for a new kind of police utility vest.

After this interesting venture into the world of art and design, we moved on to the world of Stimson and travelled to his mother’s condo, wherein we ate large quantities of delicious pizza, salad, and couscous.  From there we left directly (after passing a huge redwood pine that Stimson planted as a child) to the Huntington Library, a research institution that includes a library, and an extensive art collection. Alongside these exhibits, there is also the Huntington Botanical Gardens, 120 acres of different biomes, including the Japanese Garden, the Desert Garden, and the Chinese Garden.

Among the Huntington Library’s exhibits was a complete Gutenberg Bible, one of only 48 originally printed by the famed German inventor of movable type. There were also papers used by Albert Einstein and Nicolaus Copernicus in their works on astrophysics.

And after a long and interesting day in Pasadena, we all drove home, doing the physics exam Stimson assigned us for the car ride back. During the car ride, with nothing else to do, we calculated the approximate height of the bridge, which I found to be 54 meters. More or less, I don’t know how aerodynamic our watermelon was.