Recognized as one of the most beautiful experiments of all time, the oil drop experiment performed by Robert Millikan and his graduate students (primarily Harvey Fletcher) is a standard in the repertoire of experiments performed by undergraduate physics students. However, "as a teaching lab it does not enjoy a good reputation for three…

Mobile phones are a widely used platform for educational apps, mobile health, and a variety of chemical tests. Here, we are working on a mobile phone-based physics lab (mPhysics) that uses a mobile phone's capabilities to run simple physics experiments and demonstrations. While a mobile phone can be used to analyze magnetic and optical properties…

The Arduino microcontroller is currently one of the favorite tools of makers, and many teachers have used it in teaching or experiments. In addition, light-emitting diode (LED) smart lighting is the worldwide trend in lighting. There are many teaching demonstrations or applications of color addition using LEDs. Furthermore, the Internet of Things…

In this article, we present a low-cost lab experience, enhanced by new technologies and easy to execute. The objective of the experiment is to explore the moment of inertia of a fidget spinner quantitatively. Our choice was to integrate the teaching of physics with the use of a popular toy, the fidget spinner, very popular among young people and…

During the August 21, 2017, solar eclipse, high school students measured secondary cosmic ray flux using QuarkNet detectors. These students conducted experiments examining cosmic ray flux, shower, speed of muons, and muon lifetime using QuarkNet cosmic ray muon detectors (CRMDs). These detectors measure muon flux of momenta greater than ~2 GeV, a…

In this work, we present an experimental approximation to the study of the phenomenon of radioactivity in secondary schools, taking as an analogy the process of release of carbon dioxide in a carbonated beverage. In this way, we intend to facilitate the approach to the mathematical formalism and to the graphical description of this phenomenon, as…

Although ripple tanks have been used in the past to perform wave simulations for electromagnetic and acoustic phenomena, especially before the advent of computers, they are still often used to demonstrate wave propagation in high school and college physics classrooms. Usually ripple tanks have a rectangular shape. The wave propagating through the…

Newton's laws are a ubiquitous topic in introductory physics instruction. One common problem involves asking what will happen if you stick your finger into a cup of water sitting on a scale. A way to solve the problem would be to first recognize that the water exerts a buoyant force upward on the finger, which students can recognize as being the…

As soon as children can see, they observe that objects fall freely. From a young age, we spontaneously construct interpretative models to understand this everyday phenomenon. Over the last three decades, numerous experiments have been developed to help students understand physics concepts regarding free fall. Although there are many…

Old physics textbooks give us a great opportunity to learn about the history of science and rediscover different methods to teach physics to our students. There are many disused and forgotten experiments in them, but these can still be very useful to affirm and understand physics. This is the case of an instrument used in the 19th century to…

Measuring permeability in a high school physics course has long been a hard task. However, with the advent of using smartphones in the classroom, it is not only possible but even easily done. This paper offers detailed instructions on how to measure permeability using a smartphone's magnetometer, starting with experimentally discovering the…

Science labs should promote reasoning that resembles the work that scientists do. However, this is often not the case. We present a lab in which students strive to find out which of two models best describes a physics experiment. The quantification of measurement uncertainties--another topic that is often neglected in high school…

The physical problem of a body of water in a tank that drains through a hole in the base is a classical problem that has been studied since at least the time of Torricelli. To fixate this in a student's mind, one could ask them to visualize a bathtub that is being drained through the plughole or a bottle being drained through a tap. This problem…

One of the main topics of elementary physics is the idea that every material is composed of "little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one other." These particles could be atoms or molecules. Atoms are the smallest part into…

While laboratories have long been associated with introductory physics courses, there is doubt as to whether they positively impact student learning. Holmes and Wieman found that students who elected to take optional laboratories fared no better across a range of metrics than their counterparts who did not participate. In addition, these…