Abstract:

Smartphones have indisputably become almost inseparable from people nowadays. This research sprang from the inspiration of making use of smartphones to aid in teaching free-fall and acceleration due to gravity (g) in Physics. This study aims to make use of the in-built accelerometer in smartphones to determine the value of g. In this quantitative study, an experimental method of determining g was performed using two smartphones of the same brand, but of different masses. The smartphones were dropped simultaneously at a fixed height. Five trials were done for each height of fall in a 0.25m-interval from 0.25m-1.25m. The built-in accelerometers in smartphones coupled with the Physics Toolbox Suite app, freely available in the market, made it possible for the time of fall to be extracted from the recorded data with a high degree of accuracy. The results of this study showed that the experimental g for both smartphones only differed by less than 2% from the calculated local value. Moreover, there was no significant difference between the two values of experimental g.

Keywords:

Acceleration due to gravity, free-fall, smartphones, accelerometer, Physics teaching.