Smartphone Pocket Lab: Experimental Classical Mechanics

It is perfect if you have scientific knowledge needed to enter university.
If this knowledge is not complete or partially lost or somewhat old, we shall propose you a qualitative approach.
This qualitative approach is based on the use of a real time and interactive representation on your laptop screen of measured data. This representation is based on our open source software iMecaProf.

You can therefore do experiments following two different strategies:

You are interested by playing with scientific concepts associated to motion, but not necessarily by entering a full quantitative data treatment.
The strategy 1, firstly based on this qualitative approach is what you are looking for. This is made possible using iMecaProf. For example, you shall control by hand a pendulum (The smartphone is hanging from its charging cable whose USB connector, the upper extremity, is held by your hand). To do so you shall use real time information on laptop screen as a dashboard. Part of this qualitative strategy of learning is based on games.

You want to have first this qualitative approach to play with your smartphone and with key concepts associated for example to energy conservation.
But you also want to do a full quantitative analysis of real data collected during your experiment, then we have built for you a second strategy.
In strategy 2, first you play with physics as in strategy 1, but when you are happy with qualitative control of experiment, you save data in a .csv file that can be transfered in any spreadsheet such as Excel. In that case, you will learn to do experiments and to treat the collected data by smartphone sensors using Classical Mechanics at the level required by most universities in first year. In order to do quantitative data treatment, we shall use of a spreadsheet such as Excel. This can be learnt during the course

Joel Chevrier
Professeur de physique à l'Université Grenoble AlpesEn délégation au CRI Paris de l'Université Paris DescartesBeside research activities in Nanosciences and teaching at Master level, he has taught at first year level for the last twenty years