Phyphox smartphone labs in physics education: Breaking the vicious circle of student disengagement

Since the late 1960s, there has been a consensus that rote science learning has long-range negative consequences for student learning. Across the Western world, a number of well-funded reforms attempted to address this problem. Yet, the vicious circle of student science disengagement has continued. We believe that one of the reasons for this phenomenon is that, by and large, science teaching hasn’t changed sufficiently to meet the changing needs of the 21st century students. While many novel science education technologies have emerged lately, few secondary teachers have taken full advantage of these innovative tools. Surprisingly, instead of using already available technology, such as phyphox smartphone app (Staacks et al., 2018), to alter how secondary students engage with physics learning, technology is too often used to support old ways of learning physics, such as passively watching videos of recorded experiments or doing cookbook labs with computer simulations. Even the COVID-19 school closures and remote teaching are yet to become catalysts for re-evaluating secondary student science engagement. Paradoxically, as students become more engaged with their new digital tools (e.g., smartphones) in their personal lives, they become more disengaged from their formal K-12 science learning. We discuss how smartphones, novel technologies that 21st century students already have in their pockets and use daily for social interactions, can help break the vicious circle of secondary science disengagement by inspiring students to do data-driven science at school and at home (Milner-Bolotin & Milner, 2022; Milner-Bolotin et al., 2021). First, we propose a pedagogical approach for using smartphones in a science classroom to conduct hands-on inquiry that focuses on experimental design, data collection, and analysis. Second, we describe our experience of using this approach in a secondary physics classroom, as well as during the province-wide annual Physics Olympics event that takes place at the University of British Columbia (Milner-Bolotin et al., 2019). Third, we discuss how science educators can support new and practicing teachers in implementing this novel smartphone technology – phyphox – in their classrooms through mentorship during the physics teacher education and professional communities of practice. REFERENCES Milner-Bolotin, M., Liao, T., & McKenna, J. (2019). UBC Physics Olympics: Forty-one years of province-wide physics outreach. International Newsletter on Physics Education: International Commission on Physics Education - International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, 70(November), 5-6. https://mailchi.mp/a448561565a8/icpe-newsletter-issue-70-november-2019?e=[UNIQID] Milner-Bolotin, M., & Milner, V. (2022). Smartphone applications as a catalyst for active learning in chemistry: Investigating the Ideal Gas Law. In Y. J. Dori, C. Ngai, & G. Szteinberg (Eds.), Digital tools for equitable in person and remote chemistry learning (pp. 20). Royal Society of Chemistry. Milner-Bolotin, M., Milner, V., Tasnadi, A. M., Weck, H. T., Gromas, I., & Ispanovity, P. D. (2021). Contemporary experiments and new devices in physics classrooms. GIREP - Physics Education Conference 2019 Proceedings. http://fiztan.phd.elte.hu/english/student/devices.pdf  Staacks, S., Hütz, S., Heinke, H., & Stampfer, C. (2018). Advanced tools for smartphone-based experiments: phyphox. Physics education, 53(4), 045009. https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6552/aac05

Teaching and Learning Physics with Smartphones

Innovación EducativaThe use of mobile technologies is reshaping how to teach and learn. In this paper the authors describe their research on the use of these technologies to teach physics. On the one hand they develop mobile applications to complement the traditional learning and to help students learn anytime and anywhere. The use of these applications has proved to have very positive influence on the students’ engagement. On the other hand, they use smartphones as measurement devices in physics experiments. This opens the possibility of designing and developing low cost laboratories where expensive material can be substituted by smartphones. The smartphones’ sensors are reliable and accurate enough to permit good measurements. However, as it is shown with some examples, special care must be taken here if one does not know how these apps used to access the sensors’ data are programmed

UNDERGRADUATE ENGINEERING STUDENTS’ ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE USE OF PHYPHOX IN PHYSICS EXPERIMENT

During the pandemic, the faculty of engineering at Trisakti University still used old apparatus and onsite learning in practical lectures, albeit with some COVID restrictions. Nowadays, when the pandemic is going out the faculty is trying to implement a new method in practical lectures using a smartphone-based application to enhance the effectiveness of physics experiments. This research aims to discover the students’ attitudes toward the use of Phyphox in physics experiments and to examine the differences in the attitude between students with various backgrounds, such as gender, department, smartphone use, and prior experience. Two hundred self-developed questionnaires were delivered to seven departments in the faculty of engineering that have participated in this research. The findings indicated that: gender correlated to significant differences in some factors of attitude; smartphone use did not affect attitude; students with prior experience showed more positive attitude; and the major taken by students correlated with majority of factors of attitude towards the use of Phyphox in physics experiment. This research article presents a case study of the integration of the Phyphox application, that utilises the smartphones' integrated sensors in hands-on physics experiments, in an inquiry framework

Effectiveness of a laboratory course with Arduino and smartphones

Arduino and Smartphones have been used since 2021 in a class of practicals held at Sapienza Università di Roma, to train physics undergraduates in laboratory activities. This paper briefly describes the organisation of the activities and report about the results of questionnaires administered to participating students before and after the course

Smartphones in the teaching of Physics Laws: Projectile motion

New technologies are called upon to play an important role as beneficial tools for meaningful learning in the classroom. In particular, smartphones can be regarded as pocket computers that, in addition to a remarkable memory and computing capacity, incorporate sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, light sensors, etc., which turn them into easily available measurement instruments for practical classes in an educational environment. In this study, the suitability of these devices for demonstrating Classical Mechanics, minimizing the use of resources and class time, has been assessed in two real classrooms (with 16 to 19 year-old students) by conducting experiments related to projectile motion (vertical free fall and parabolic motion). A simple methodology that only involves a mobile phone, a free burst camera application and open-source tools (GIMP and OpenOffice Calc) for data processing is presented. The results obtained in non-perfected conditions led to an estimate of the acceleration of gravity with an error lower than 2%. Further analyses and alternative procedures are also suggested in the discussion section. No major difficulties were encountered with the high school students or with the first year university ones, and a high degree of satisfaction was found