Day 3: Hollywood Thrills & Mickey Bar Skills

Hello everyone! Welcome back to day three of our blog as we follow along our journeys on the Furman Math and the Mouse MayX. 

After eating a good breakfast at the hotel, we departed on the buses at 8:00. We scanned into the park around 8:30 and went straight to our first ride, Tower of Terror, at the Hollywood Studios. Our original plan was to head to Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway, but Dr. Hutson saw a short wait time, so we pivoted our direction. Do you want to know a fun fact about this ride? There are four different drop patterns that you may have for each ride. We were lucky that we got to experience two different patterns!

Following up with our first ride in the early morning, we headed over to Toy Story Land, where we got right in line at Toy Story Mania. In this ride, we put on our 3D glasses and worked as fast as we could to hit as many targets. To score points, you had to pull a rope, and by the end, we all felt like we just did a mini workout! Want to know a fun fact about this ride? There is a secret way to score more points that you can find on the Internet, so next time we come back, we will definitely be more prepared to win the game. 

As we left Toy Story Land, we found ourselves in Galaxy’s Edge as we prepared to fly an adventurous ship. We got separated into pilots who flew the plane, gunners who shot at the enemy, and engineers who worked to fix the aircraft. The goal of this adventure is to cause the least damage and collect two containers of coaxium. Here is another fun fact that you might want to know about this flight: if all six crew members coordinated the controls and hit the orange button, they would get Chewbacca as the mission guide rather than Hondo Ohnaka. 

After our groups all got at least one can of coaxium, we decided to discover more areas inside Galaxy’s Edge. We decided to hop on Star Tours and spent 20 minutes flying around different galaxies and successfully landed back at our home base. Guess what we figured out after the flight? This flight has been at Disney World for more than thirty years, which is considered to be one of the oldest original attractions at Disney. 

After we were exhausted from fighting other enemy ships, we decided to end the first day at Hollywood Studios with Tower of Terror, and you can probably guess that it was Dr. Hutson’s idea. Our second sequence was a lot more unpredictable than the first drop, but everyone seemed to get a nice pose for the photo. 

After we did Tower of Terror, we headed back to the hotel and had a longer break than usual, which did not feel long enough to us. We gathered back at 2:00 to start our second class time. Dr. Hutson handed out “Posted and Actual” instructions, which demonstrated the difference between the actual waiting time and the predicted time, which is displayed at the front of each line. Then, we got the handout about our very first project, which is where we should place the Mickey bar carts at the Magic Kingdom. We separated into our four designated groups that were split based on crowd levels and the East vs. West of the park. In the small groups, everyone was discussing how they plan to approach the project and started working hard for three hours with support from our three amazing professors. Dr. Bouzarth introduced us to Tableau, which is a visualization tool that will be helpful for our first presentation on Tuesday. 

After long hours of lots of hard work, we were rewarded with a sweet treat at Twistee Treats! This delicious treat gave us a boost of energy to continue working on our first project. Once we got back, everyone grabbed computers and got back to work. Today was filled with joy and fun followed by lots of hard work! Keep following along to hear about our first presentations on Tuesday!

Today’s blog was written by Tram Le and Cassie Larsen.