Speaker
Description
Smartphones are equipped with sensors that measure various physical phenomena (such as a magnetometer to measure magnetic fields) along with onboard computational power capable of processing the data from these measurements and displaying them in a human-readable way. These features make smartphones a candidate for use as experimental tools in educational physics laboratories, which has already undergone some study, though insufficient research has been done for this use of smartphones in the remote learning environment. In this study we explored the use of smartphones in the educational physics laboratory and remote education contexts with the goal of producing guides for designing and implementing activities that use the smartphone as a measurement device. To produce these, we used a design-based research methodology consisting of a series of iterative design-cycles in which we designed the activities, tested them with student participants and revised the activities based on data from testing. The main activity involved using the smartphone magnetometer sensor to determine the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field. Although we intentionally avoided detailed, step-by-step instruction, we found that students could not practically coordinate the magnetometer sensor readings to make sense of the Earth’s magnetic field direction without contextual guidance on using the sensor and framing for the measurement. Further our study demonstrated the important role that in-person mediation plays and the challenges of designing and implementing activities without this in the remote learning environment.
| Apply for student award at which level: | PhD |
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| Consent on use of personal information: Abstract Submission | Yes, I ACCEPT |