Gaining an understanding of how science works is central to an undergraduate education in biology and biochemistry. The reasoning required to design or interpret experiments that ask specific questions does not come naturally, and is an essential part of the science process skills that must be learned for an understanding of how scientists conduct…

In this paper, we show the potential of webcams as precision measuring instruments in a physics laboratory. Various sources of error appearing in 2D coordinate measurements using low-cost commercial webcams are discussed, quantifying their impact on accuracy and precision, and simple procedures to control these sources of error are presented.…