WELCOME ON SMARTPHYSICSLAB

An initiative to find and exchange ideas and resources for creative physics laboratory activities. We aim to encourage exciting and empowering experiments, creating your own simple instruments and measurements. We embrace smartphones, Arduino boards and readily available materials!

experiments ideas brainstorming

GET INVOLVED

If you want to be part of our community, be able to discuss, share ideas, etc., please register in our google group filling this form. In the last field, please provide enough information to let us check that you are a teacher or a mentor and are eligible as a collaborator.

WANT TO CONTRIBUTE?

Share your ideas with us using our Slack channel. You can propose new experiments, which, upon acceptance, will be published on our website with appropriate credits. In order to properly format your proposal download the template from the link below, edit it and submit it to smartphysicslab@gmail.com.

TEMPLATE: the template is provided as a zip file. Currently, we support LaTeX and Word documents.

OTHER INITIATIVES

If you have landed on our site, you might be interested in checking out also some other places! Let us know of other initiatives, and even better write an ideas-blog piece for this website on what they are achieving!

OPENTP an inspiring teaching program at Paris-Saclay University.
ALPhA a community promoting advanced physics labs. Includes a lot of remote lab discussion.
PICUP Partnership for Integration of Computation into Undergraduate Physics.
Hands-On-School An annual graduate school designed to introduce graduate students and young faculty from developing countries to table-top scientific research - currently hosted at ICTP.
Isaac Physics - does not cover experiments, but is perhaps the global (free) go-to site for physics education at advanced High-School to first year university.
IOPSpark provides access to thousands of teaching activities.
ChatPhysics collects teaching resources from a community, similarly to what we do, with a wider scope.

USEFUL TOOLS

Here we list few tools that you may find useful to perform experiments

Arduino is a family of microcontroller boards, and a fairly simple programming language, backed by a huge community of makers. Educational kits are available, and a large number of add-on hardware and examples.

Raspberry Pi are a family of compact and cheap computers designed and marketed by a not-for-profit foundation. They are often used in instrumentation and robotics... and bench top experiments!

Smartphones carry a large number of sensors and processing power. phyphox is an award winning app that makes measurements straightforward, enabling a lot of physics! They also provide a library to interface Arduino and phyphox. A similar tool is offered by Physics Toolbox. Arduino and Google have now teamed up to support experiments with Science Journal. Programming an Android smartphone is possible with tools from google or other simplified coding environments such as DroidScript. Simple devices like IOIO board can allow you to connect smartphones to other hardware.

Contacts

Editorial board

The editorial board oversees the website content and is responsible for consistency among distributed materials.

email

You can communicate with us using emails
smartphysicslab@gmail.com

slack

We have a Slack workspace to discuss materials on this website, and other ideas. Please register your interest by filling out registration form and we will send you the Slack invitation code.