An outlook at the educational mobile apps to the physics subjects available in the android operating system

Abstract

The presence of smartphones in the classrooms have been the theme of big debates among those involved in educational spaces. It is undeniable that its inclusion in teaching and learning processes approaches the school to the world where the student is in and an important step to elaborate strategies that involve the use of smartphones is to know the educational apps functionalities. In this context, this article is proposed to do a systematic mapping of free educational apps to the physics teaching, available at the Android operating system presented in most smartphones and available at Google Play Store. It was adopted as methodology a systematic mapping organized in four steps. At the first moment the research was made with the use of the word “Physics” and 250 apps were found, the second step was intended to select the apps with physics content in Portuguese, which brought the number of 42 apps. Following, the third step was intended to map the specific apps for the physics subjects, excluding those that present in their content several subjects or only exercises collection, finding, so, 25 apps. Lastly, in fourth step, it was made a description of the apps selected from step 3 with more than 10.000 downloads. What was noticed in the description is that practically none presents the contextualization of physical phenomena or simulations; they only highlight nature theoretical or mathematical descriptions.