Pendulum experiments with three modern electronic devices and a modeling tool

Abstract

Traditional physics labs in high school suffer from slow data acquisition so that some dynamic behavior of variables could be hidden from students. Modern electronic devices such as Lego Mindstorms NXT, smartphones and Arduino can acquire data at a fast rate and can be used to measure dynamic variables with reasonable precision in physics experiments. A case in point is the changing angle of a pendulum experiment. With a tool called InduLab, students in three groups using the mobile devices mentioned above in pendulum experiments collected data and built their models with the data. Experimental results showed that the Arduino group achieved the highest success rate of building correct models, followed by the smartphone group and then the NXT group. The results indicate that modern low-cost electronic devices can be used to improve physics labs in high school.