Today's students are increasingly immersed in a landscape of screens and handheld digital devices through which a good deal of their interactions with the world around them are mediated. Physics educators, meanwhile, continue to rely on traditional human interactions with the physical world, such as sliding down a ramp or throwing a baseball, in…

In this work, we propose an interesting combination of the Atwood machine and Galileo's inclined plane to study quantitatively kinematics with a smartphone and the phyphox app. For this purpose, we use the optical stopwatch function, based on the photosensor of the smartphone. The choice of phyphox app has some advantages for presenting the…

An amusement park is full of examples that can be made into challenging problems for students, combining mathematical modelling with video analysis, as well as measurements in the rides. Traditional amusement ride related textbook problems include free-fall, circular motion, pendula and energy conservation in roller coasters, where the moving…

A popular activity among young children is the use of mobile devices and apps. Yet, the impact of mobile devices on learning and development is rather underexplored. The limited studies identified explore effects on literacy development and communication and report on mixed findings. A considerable gap is observed as to how the use of mobile apps…

The year 2014 marked the four-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Galileo's birth, making it the perfect occasion to present and illustrate a GeoGebra applet which reproduces some of Galileo's celebrated experiments on the uniformly accelerated motion, as reported on in "Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New…

Carrying out classroom experiments that demonstrate Boyle's law and Gay-Lussac's law can be challenging. Even if we are able to conduct classroom experiments using pressure gauges and syringes, the results of these experiments do little to illuminate the kinetic theory of gases. However, molecular dynamics simulations that run on computers allow…

Mobile devices have become a popular form of education technology, but little attention has been paid to the use of their sensors for data collection and analysis. This article describes some of the benefits of using mobile devices this way and presents five challenges to help students overcome common misconceptions about force and motion. The…

The traditional Run the Football Field physics activity--in which students are timed as they move at different speeds on a football field to investigate displacement and velocity--has been updated for the 21st century. Nowadays, GPS-enabled tablets and smartphones replace the stopwatches and yard markers of the past, allowing students to collect…

So far relatively little research in education has explored the pedagogical and learning potentials of applications (Apps) on tablet PCs (TPCs). Drawing upon research on learning technologies and taking an embodied perspective, this study first identified educational functionalities of TPCs and generated guidelines to design educational Apps for…

With the increased availability of modern technology and handheld probeware for classrooms, the iPad and the Video Physics application developed by Vernier are used to capture and analyze the motion of an ice hockey puck within secondary-level physics education. Students collect, analyze, and generate digital modes of representation of physics…

Describes a one-dimensional model for an ideal gas to study development of disordered motion in Newtonian mechanics. A Monte Carlo procedure for simulation of the statistical ensemble of an ideal gas with fixed total energy is developed. Compares both approaches for a pseudoexperimental foundation of statistical mechanics. (Author/JN)

Describes the use of a microcomputer in studying a model experiment (Brownian particles colliding with thermal particles). A flow chart and program for the experiment are provided. Suggests that this experiment may foster a deepened understanding through mutual dialog between the student and computer. (SK)

Different programs have been developed for the simulation of physics experiments by using TI-57 programmable calculators. Two of these programs, describing the simulation of a successive radioactive decay and the random motion of a gas molecule, are presented. (Author/SK)

Microcomputer-based instrumentation packages enable computers to collect continuous analog data, convert data to digital form for processing, and display results on monitor. Discusses classroom advantages of these packages, describes one package for teaching harmonic motion, and provides a list of currently available packages (including vendor and…

Describes a series of laboratory experiments and computer simulations of the motion of electrons in electric and magnetic fields. These experiments, which involve an inexpensive student-built electron gun, study the electron mean free path, magnetic focusing, and other aspects. (Author/HM)