Traditional experimentation is not always possible at school. Some of the reasons may be: lack of adequate staff, poorly equipped school laboratories, remote learning, children absent from school during experimental exercises, etc. In such situations, traditional experimentation can be done by using smartphone apps to replace the meters in school laboratories. Moreover, smartphone experimentation can also be introduced as an enrichment of the classical education or as an alternative to classical experimentation. The Phyphox app can be used as a starting point for designing new experiments. By using the app, students are not dependent on school gadgets and measuring devices for their experiments, but only on the phone and its limitations.
Phyphox is a free app that allows you to monitor, capture measurements and graph your results from your smartphone during the experiment. Using different sensors built into the phone, many different experiments can be monitored.
This master thesis presents two experiments that can be conducted with appropriate instructions independently in pairs by 8th and 9th grade students in primary school. To conduct the experiments, students need a smart device (phone or tablet) with the Phyphox app loaded and simple tools that almost every household has.
One class took part in each experiment and four physics teachers gave their feedback on the materials created and on the experiments using their phones and the Phyphox app. The materials presented for smartphone experiments are on Air Pressure in the 8th grade and on Gravitational Acceleration in the 9th grade. The materials consist of written instructions for preparing and conducting the experimental work in the form of worksheets.
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