Fausto Casaburo
The COVID-19 impacted the teaching; indeed, both schools and universities had to shift from face-to-face to distance teaching organizing on-line lectures. Thanks to easily accessible materials, smartphones physics apps, on-line toolsand devices, it's possible to perform laboratory practice even in this period. In this paper, a method to measure the gravitational acceleration by oscillation of a simple pendulum, using Arduino board, is presented.
Enhance your smartphone with a Bluetooth Arduino nano board: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.10531
F. Bouquet, G. Creutzer, D. Dorsel, J. Vince, J. Bobroff
Using smartphones in experimental physics teachings offers many advantages in term of engagement, pedagogy and flexibility. But it presents the drawbacks of possibly endangering the device and also facing the heterogeneity of available sensors on different smartphones. We present a low-cost alternative that preserves the advantages of smartphones: using a microcontroller equipped with a large variety of sensors that transmits data to a smartphone using Bluetooth Low-Energy protocol. This device can be lent to students with little risks and used to perform a wide range of experiments. It opens the way to new types of physics teachings.
Teaching Physics by Arduino during COVID-19 Pandemic: Measurement of the Newton's cooling law time-constant: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.09527
Fausto Casaburo
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, schools and universities had to the shift from face-to-face to distance teaching, organizing on-line lectures. Easily accessible materials, smartphones physics apps, on-line tools and devices can be used to perform laboratory practice even in this period. In this paper a method to measure the Newton's cooling law time-constant by Arduino board is presented.
Brewster angle as never seen before: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.07806
Alejandro Doval, Raúl de la Fuente
In this paper we will discuss a demonstration we have been performing for years; not only with physics students from our university (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela), but also with high school students in some talks aimed at encouraging them to study science. It is related to Brewster's angle and its visualization in an ingenious way using a "loaded" LCD monitor. In some way, this experiment is a reverse version of what happens when a vampire faces a mirror and sees no reflected image of himself.
The role of introductory physics for life sciences in supporting students to use physical models flexibly: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.08863
Benjamin D. Geller, Maya Tipton, Brandon Daniel-Morales, Nikhil Tignor, Calvin White, Catherine H. Crouch
An important goal of introductory physics for the life sciences (IPLS) is for those students to be prepared to use physics to model and analyze biological situations in their future studies and careers. Here we report our findings on life science students' ability to carry out a sophisticated biological modeling task at the end of first-semester introductory physics, some in a standard course (N = 34), and some in an IPLS course (N = 61), both taught with active learning and covering the same core physics concepts. We found that the IPLS students were dramatically more successful at building a model combining multiple ideas they had not previously seen combined, and at making complex decisions about how to apply an equation to a particular physical situation, although both groups displayed similar success at solving simpler problems. Both groups identified and applied simple models that they had previously used in very similar contexts, and executed calculations, at statistically indistinguishable rates. Further study is needed to determine whether IPLS students are more expert problem-solvers in general or solely in biological settings.
The impact of introductory physics for the life sciences in a senior biology capstone course: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.07671
Benjamin D. Geller (1), Jack Rubien (1), Sara M. Hiebert (2), Catherine H. Crouch (1) (Swarthmore College, (1) Department of Physics & Astronomy and (2) Department of Biology)
A goal of Introductory Physics for Life Sciences (IPLS) curricula is to prepare students to effectively use physical models and quantitative reasoning in biological and medical settings. To assess whether this goal is being met, we conducted a longitudinal study of the impact of IPLS on student work in later biology and chemistry courses. We report here on one part of that study, a comparison of written responses by students with different physics backgrounds on a diffusion task administered in a senior biology capstone course. We observed differences in student reasoning that were associated with prior or concurrent enrollment in IPLS. In particular, we found that IPLS students were more likely than non-IPLS students to reason quantitatively and mechanistically about diffusive phenomena, and to successfully coordinate between multiple representations of diffusive processes, even up to two years after taking the IPLS course. Finally, we describe methodological challenges encountered in both this task and other tasks used in our longitudinal study.