The possibilities seem endless.

There's the "largest group hug," set last year by 5,117 students, staff and friends from St. Matthew Catholic High School in Ontario, Canada, according to Guinness. Huggers embraced each other for at least 10 seconds.

The largest pillow fight, also set last year, consisted of 2,773 participants in Dodgeville, Wis., also in the Guinness book.

The year before, 10,240 Chinese children brushed their teeth simultaneously for at least 60 seconds in Shenzhen City, China, setting the Guinness record for the most people brushing their teeth simultaneously, in honor of National Oral Health Day.

For all those who think Utah has packed classrooms: According to Guinness, the world's largest school, pupil-wise, is the City Montessori School in Lucknow, India, which by September 2002 had a record enrollment of 26,312.

"It's fun," Clements said of her school's spate of record-setting. "We're the ones who get to be in charge of setting up which records we want to do . . . and we get a lot of skills."

The Eisenhower students came up with the ice cream cone feat. Their World Records for Schools organization is able to sponsor its own world records and can provide people to certify record-setting events, the Web site states.

Monday's attempt will work like this:

A three-person team — a scooper, a placer and a cone holder — has 20 minutes to make the world's tallest ice cream cone. Eisenhower will put forth about 10 separate teams to increase their chances, ninth-grader Nick Morandi said of breaking the standard 12.25 inches the school set a couple of months ago in practice.

A foot-high gelato doesn't seem too tough. But don't be so sure.

At no time during the event can anyone handle or touch the ice cream (drips on the cone-handler's hand notwithstanding). The ice cream must be commercially made vanilla and/or chocolate, for consistency. The room temperature must be above 68 degrees, and the ice cream has to be in the freezer until five minutes before the record attempt. The cone also must be 3 inches in diameter or less, and the ice cream scoops can't be too wide.

Through it all, students are using creativity, problem-solving, organizational skills and teamwork — even math and physics, Brough said.

For instance, teams will attempt to make the ice cream as cold as possible, hopefully without exposing the cone holder's hand to frostbite, a potential problem discovered in trial runs, Brough said.

"It's very educational. It's hands on," he said of the after-school activity. And the way kids take to it, he says, "it's hilarious."

Eisenhower's record would indicate it has a pretty good shot at the ice cream cone world record.

But if the students don't make it, they can always challenge this one:

The "longest lesson learned," set by a Polish teacher and her two dozen students, which droned through 66 hours, from June 7-10, 2004.

Any takers?

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E-mail: jtcook@desnews.com