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Assistive technologies are frequently used to help disabled students to access core and expanded core curricula and to improve their functional, communication and literacy skills. Non-optical low vision devices and optical and tactile graphics technologies are some of the assistive technologies used by visually impaired students in today's classrooms. In this study, we used a smartphone app, a Braille printer, and the Braille Spotdot embosser to design and develop a science activity to teach the concept of constant speed to a visually impaired student and two non-impaired peers using the 5E instructional model. The goal of the activity was to help students develop such skills as defining a problem, designing an experiment, and drawing graphs as well as to learn to compute unit rates and comprehend proportional relationships among variables.

There are many examples of using smartphones in physics experiments. Students and teachers can easily perform many physics experiments with the help of smartphone sensors, even experiments for which high-cost materials are needed. There are different types of such experiments in which various kinds of sensors are used. Many physical quantities can be reliably measured with smartphone sensors after some calibration. One of the physical quantities that can be determined with these sensors is object speed. For example, the angular velocities of rotating objects have been measured with a smartphone light as well as proximity, acceleration, and magnetic field sensors. The speeds of light-emitting objects traveling on a straight path and inclined plane have also been determined with a smartphone light sensor. Ball velocities have also been determined with a smartphone oscilloscope app. In this study, we determine the speed of a toy car over a certain distance using smartphone magnetic field, light, and proximity sensors simultaneously with just one experiences.

This study aims to measure the angular velocity of a clock's second hand and the average angular velocity of a metronome using a smartphone. To determine the angular velocities, the ticking of clock's second hand and the metronome beats were recorded. The angle between the extreme left and right positions of the metronome's hand was also measured. Some free smartphone applications for these measurements, e.g. 'Grandfather Clock,' 'Metronome,' 'Protractor,' and 'Physics Toolbox Sensor Suite' were used during the study. The results revealed that the smartphone can be a reliable tool in determining the angular velocities of rotating or oscillating objects that emit sound.

The use of smartphones is increasingly gaining popularity in education. Students and teachers can determine scientific concepts using smartphones equipped with sensors such as Global Positioning System (GPS -- a navigation system that provides location information) and orientation (a device to measure coordinates according to a reference frame). In this study, two students and a research assistant determined the height of a flag pole using the smartphone app "ClinoPosition," which gathers data from its GPS and orientation sensors, and applying the "Haversine formula." This helped connect their day-to-day experiences to mathematics and technology.

In recent years, smartphone sensors have been frequently used in educational demonstrations to improve students' understanding of certain physical kinematic topics. In particular, the sensors on modern smartphones enable students to use their phones as physics mini-laboratories, and they have been used to analyze objects' speeds and accelerations and to investigate the conservation of energy and magnetic field properties. As a particular example, one of the sensors on smartphones capable of being used to measure the speed and acceleration of light-emitting objects, and the value of g and spring constant, is the smartphone's light sensor. In similar fashion, we now outline how a smartphone's light sensor may be used to find the angular velocity, linear velocity, and centripetal acceleration of a light-emitting toy train moving on a circular track.

This study investigates how the acceleration and speed of a light-emitting object on an inclined plane may be determined using a smartphone's light sensor. A light-emitting object was released from the top of an inclined plane and its illuminance values were detected by a smartphone's light sensor during its subsequent motion down the plane. Using the illuminance and time values recorded by the smartphone, the distances between the sensor and the light-emitting object can be calculated. From these known distance and time values, the uniform acceleration and speed of the light-emitting object at any time could also be determined. A second method was also used to determine these values, i.e. the analysis of video-recordings of the light-emitting object during its motion. The values found by these two different methods were in good agreement. Thus, this experiment demonstrates that a smartphone's light sensor can be used as a reliable instrument to determine the constant acceleration and speed of light-emitting objects.

This study aims to demonstrate how the average speed of a light-emitting toy car may be determined using a smartphone's light sensor. The freely available Android smartphone application, "AndroSensor," was used for the experiment. The classroom experiment combines complementary physics knowledge of optics and kinematics to find the average speed of a moving object. The speed of the toy car is found by determining the distance between the light-emitting toy car and the smartphone, and the time taken to travel these distances. To ensure that the average speed of the toy car calculated with the help of the AndroSensor was correct, the average speed was also calculated by analyzing video-recordings of the toy car. The resulting speeds found with these different methods were in good agreement with each other. Hence, it can be concluded that reliable measurements of the average speed of light-emitting objects can be determined with the help of the light sensor of an Android smartphone.

This study explores finding the areas of polygons with a smartphone light sensor. A square and an irregular pentagon were chosen as our polygons. During the activity, the LED light was placed at the vertices of our polygons, and the illuminance values of this LED light were detected by the smartphone light sensor. The smartphone was placed on a rotating time-lapse device, and this device was placed at the intersection point of the line segments in the polygons. These line segments were also connected to the vertices of these polygons; therefore, the square was composed of four triangles and the pentagon of five triangles. While the rotating time-lapse device was rotating around itself, it captured the maximum illuminance values of the LED light. Using these maximum illuminance values, we calculated the lengths of the line segments. In addition, we knew the period of the rotating time-lapse device and the duration elapsed between two consecutive maximum illuminance values. Thus, we could calculate the angle between two consecutive line segments. With these values, we could also calculate the areas of the triangles in the polygons. Then, the areas of these triangles were summed to obtain the areas of the square and pentagon.