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In this paper we introduce a proposal to provide students in labs with an alternative to the traditional visible range spectrophotometers, whose acquisition and maintenance entails high costs, based on smartphones. Our solution faced two…
Due to the pandemic of COVID-19, many university courses had to abruptly transform to enable remote teaching. Adjusting courses on embedded systems and micro-controllers was extra challenging since interaction with real hardware is their…
This is a report of a course on modern physics designed and taught to undergraduate science and engineering students in the Spring of 2013. The course, meant for freshmen, attempts to integrate statistical mechanics into non-classical…
Students' curiosity often seems nearly nonexistent in a lecture setting; we discuss a variety of possible reasons for this, but it is the instructor who typically poses questions while only a few students, usually the better ones, respond.…
This article describes an implementation of low-cost portable touch screen technology, applied to university teaching, using as a base the remote control of the Nintendo Wii console (known as Wiimote), a normal projector, a computer and…
This paper presents MicroRoboScope, a portable, compact, and versatile microrobotic experimentation platform designed for real-time, closed-loop control of both magnetic and acoustic microrobots. The system integrates an embedded computer,…
The COVID-19 pandemic illuminated the critical need for flexible mechanical engineering laboratories simultaneously deployable in multiple modalities: face-to-face, hybrid, and remote. A key element in the lesson portfolio of a…
Many physics departments around the world have electronic and mechanical workshops attached to them. The job of these workshops is to design and build experimental setups and instruments for research and the training of undergraduate…
In a mobile learning environment, students can learn via mobile devices without being limited by time and space. Therefore, it is vital to develop tools to assist students to learn and assess their knowledge in such environments. This paper…
Electromagnetic systems have been used extensively for the control magnetically actuated objects, such as in microrheology and microrobotics research. Therefore, optimizing the design of such systems is highly desired. Some of the features…
When talking to secondary school students, first impressions are crucial. Accidentally say something that sounds boring and you'll lose them in seconds. A physical demonstration can be an eye-catching way to begin an activity or spark off a…
We present a new robust setup that explains and demonstrates the quantum of electrical conductance for a general audience and which is continuously available in a public space. The setup allows users to manually thin a gold wire of several…
The aim of this study is to investigate the decisions and reasoning of undergraduate students when choosing simple measurement instruments in an introductory physics laboratory course. For this study, we have developed a questionnaire and…
The rapid evolution of intelligent electronic devices makes information technology, computer science and electronics strongly related to the teaching of natural sciences. Today almost everybody has a smart phone that can convert light,…
Modern mobile phones contain a three-axis microelectromechanical system (MEMS) gyroscope, capable of taking accurate measurements of the angular velocity along the three principal axes of the phone with a sampling rate of 100 Hz or better.…
Metasurfaces can be designed to achieve prescribed functionality. Careful meta-atom design and arrangement achieve homogeneous and inhomogeneous layouts that can enable exceptional capabilities to manipulate incident waves. Inherently, the…
We present an easily reproducible, open-source, sound card based experimental set-up to support transfer function measurement. Our system is able to visualize signals of mechanical and electrical resonances and their spectra in real time.…
In this paper, we present an acoustic localization system for multiple devices. In contrast to systems which localise a device relative to one or several anchor points, we focus on the joint localisation of several devices relative to each…
A flexible and low-cost device for eddy current non-destructive testing made of off-the-shelf components is described. The proposed system is compact and easy to operate, and it consists of a dual H-bridge stepper motor driver, a coil…
While there exists a significant number of web interactives for introductory physics, students are almost never shown the computer code that generates these interactives even when the physics parts of these programs are relatively simple.…