Month: November 2022

App of the Day

On Monday, we were updating some app stats when we observed the attached impressions graph. This is the number of times the app’s icon was viewed on the App Store on devices running iOS 8, tvOS 9, macOS 10.14.1, or later. Since the beginning of this year’s school term, these daily numbers averaged at about 5…6k, so more than 1M was certainly … a bit off.

So, what happened: we are featured in the App Store as “App of the Day”. It apparently started already on late Saturday with a small effect and it has had still visible impact on Monday and Tuesday. Of course, we were aware that phyphox may be featured and Sebastian had to put some effort into preparing the artwork. Still, the release caught us by surprise — but that does not stop us from celebrating… 🎉

Impressions statistic of phyphox with a sharp spike of about 1 million on 13 Nov and quick drop to below 100k on they two days after

Online ICPE 2022

Sebastian is leading a “Technology and Labs” session at ICPE 2022 on 6 December at 04:45 UTC with the keynote “A world of smartphone experiments with the app phyphox”. It is followed by Marina Milner Bolotin’s “Phyphox smartphone labs in physics education: Breaking the vicious circle of student disengagement”.

Sebastian will cover experimentation with device sensors, DIY sensors based on the phyphoxBLE Arduino IDE as well as MicroPython library, and collaborative experiments for large audiences. All these are already routinely applied at RWTH Aachen University in physics education and open to the more than 1.5 million installations on (apparently) iPads by educational institutions worldwide* as part of the Volume Purchase Program (VPP) – and even more individual installations.

The International Conference on Physics Education (ICPE) 2022 by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) is carried out online on 5–9 December. The regular registration fee is A$60 and registrations are open. Details: ICPE-Website

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* more than 0.9 million in Germany