Last September, a group of science teachers boarded a modified 727 that’s designed to give passengers a taste of weightlessness. The plane performs parabolics: it steeply ascends then goes into a dive; during each 30-second dive, passengers experience zero gravity. For four years now, the New York Times reported in December, the Northrop Grumman Foundation has bankrolled (cost: $5.1 million) a program to give groups of science teachers rides on the plane, where they’re videoed performing playful experiments they can later share with students. The notion is, it will help them excite and inspire students to study science and math. A poll of 205 teachers who flew on the 2005 and 2006 flights, the foundation says, found that nearly 92 percent reported an increase in student interest, and around 75 percent said it helped them to persuade more students to continue to study math and science.

The Times says that the National Association of Science Teachers gives the project a thumbs up. But it quotes Grover J. Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, as saying the money could have been better spent on other projects. It’s not clear, he says, if the program actually improves their teaching or has an impact. But Geoffrey Bergen, a middle-school teacher from Connecticut who was on the September flight, is convinced it’s helpful. He told the Times that it “gives you a new tool for Newton’s laws” in a world where textbooks have a hard time competing with video games.

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