Rediscovering scientific laws in high school physics labs with mobile devices

Abstract

Traditional physics labs in high school ask students to follow step-by-step procedure to collect data in order to confirm given physical laws. This study proposes to let students take up the role of scientist in physics labs. Modern physics labs can make use of powerful mobile technologies of smartphones and Lego Mindstorms NXT. These devices can be used to act as moving objects as well as data acquisition devices. Moreover, students are asked to find the functional relation between physical variables, e.g., pendulum length and pendulum period, by detecting patterns in experimental data. An empirical study was done in a real high school setting and some interesting preliminary results were found.