Granular flows appear frequently in the natural world and in civil engineering applications. These flows can exhibit features which are surprising and counter-intuitive and are often used to test the limits of the classical continuum approximation for modelling of fluid flows. An important sub-class of the granular flows are the gravity-driven…

We present an experiment designed to study standing waves in a tube with one closed end. Two smartphones are used, one to emit a sound signal with a chosen frequency and another equipped with a microphone to detect the sound pressure level inside the tube. Due to the finite diameter of the tube, the standing wave node (or antinode) appears…

Interest in smartphone-based learning, especially in the use of internal sensors in smartphones for physics experiments, is increasing rapidly. Internal sensors in smartphones such as acoustic sensor, optical sensor, and acceleration sensor can help researchers alleviate the problems including insufficient accuracy with low-cost equipment, high…

The natural sciences, by their very nature, are based on the exploration of the physical world, and digital mobile devices are considered appropriate to support this exploration (Suárez et al., 2018) since they offer the tools that make this investigation more accessible but also ubiquitous (Crompton et al., 2017). Inquiry-based learning is a…

Recently, infrared cameras have become available as smartphone accessories. Being less expensive than regular infrared cameras they are readily affordable for schools and many teachers may even privately own one due to their potential to visualize all kinds of thermal phenomena in physics teaching. Any science teacher who wants to use such a…

When measuring the speed of an object with a video camera, a correction may be needed for the time taken by the camera to acquire the image in each frame. Examples are given where the correction is quite significant.

Propagation of sound waves is one of the fundamental concepts in physics. Some of the properties of sound propagation such as attenuation of sound intensity with increasing distance are familiar to everybody from the experiences of daily life. However, the frequency dependence of sound propagation and the effect of acoustics in confined…

We measure the vertical velocities of elevators, pedestrians climbing stairs, and drones (flying unmanned aerial vehicles), by means of smartphone pressure sensors. The barometric pressure obtained with the smartphone is related to the altitude of the device via the hydrostatic approximation. From the altitude values, vertical velocities are…

The iPhone 6 introduced a new feature of recording video in Slo-Mo mode at 240 fps (4.17 ms interval). This great capability when integrated with video analysis freeware such as Tracker offers in-depth exploration for physical phenomena such as collisions that occur in a very short duration of time. This article discusses one such usage in…

Context-aware ubiquitous learning (u-learning) is an innovative approach that integrates wireless, mobile, and context-awareness technologies to detect the situation of learners in the real world and provide adaptive support or guidance accordingly. In this paper, a context-aware u-learning environment is developed for guiding inexperienced…