IMPROVING THE PHYSICS LABORATORY EXPERIENCE THROUGH SENSORS ON A WIRELESS OPEN SOURCE HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE PLATFORM

Electronic sensing in laboratories for teaching physics opens a wide range of learning opportunities. The use of different sensors increases the number of different measurements that can be done with the same experimental arrangement and renders much more data than human assisted measurement. Then the use of sensing platforms in sceneries with limited resources, as undergraduate physics courses or secondary schools with a large number of students, could leverage the quality and quantity of attainable learning objectives. In order to such a sensing platform to be usable, a system of this kind must be highly configurable, portable, extensible and affordable.

In this paper we present our experience in developing experiments in physics with a sensing platform developed by us, and designed to satisfy the mentioned requirements stated below through the adoption of the open source hardware and software paradigms. This paper deals with a domain description of several ways in what this setting can enhance kinematic and dynamics laboratory experiments along three main axes. First enhancing the quantity and quality of experiments attainable with a given setting, second taking advantage of the student initiative in an engaging environment like this offering them freedom in configuring the sensor platform with new experiences, and third promoting the possibility of cooperation between instructors through the use of a common platform. The sensing platform can be easily constructed by teachers and it allows enhancement through new electronic sensors and programming modules. Different configurations of the platform allow the students to use it in different experiment and also in different ways in the same experiment. The proposed platform includes currently infrared tracking detectors, ultrasound sensors and three degrees of freedom accelerometers and gyroscopes. The system includes a lightweight mobile device based on the Arduino platform with sensors and a portable computing device based on the Raspberry Pi hardware with additional sensors. End users can access both devices through wireless technologies via end web services. A user friendly web client permits the students to configure and perform measurements using an internet connected smartphone or any portable computing device.