Author: Sebastian Staacks

In September phyphox will celebrate its 10th anniversary. And we will do so in style with three different events in Aachen targeting three different user groups:

A public experiment show (in German) for anyone who is interested in phyphox. The show will be moderated by Nicolas Wöhrl und Reinhard Remfort from the podcast “Methodisch Inkorrekt”. More info

An international conference on smartphone experiments in STEM education with several invited speakers, hands-on experiments, poster presentations and of course news from the phyphox team. More info

Our yearly teacher training (in German) with workshops for different experience levels. Get started with first simple experiments, learn how to modify phyphox with the editor or mix DIY Arduino projects with phyphox. More info

We are thrilled to receive the RWTH Aachen Special Teaching Award! For the phyphox team, this honor is a wonderful recognition of our work and of the many years of collaborative development behind the project. It is especially motivating to see innovative teaching approaches and open digital tools being valued so highly in academic education. The recognition by the Rectorate of the impact of phyphox means a lot to us and encourages us to continue improving and expanding the project. You can find more details in the official RWTH article “How fast does the roller coaster accelerate? Your smartphone knows.”

Earlier today we have published version 1.1.5, which mostly introduces new translations into Spanish (by Edinson Isai Carlos Abanto, Guillermo Jorge and Ruben Santiago Martinez) and Turkish (by Fatih Can Birinci). Note that the Turkish translation already partially slipped into previous releases by accident when it was still incomplete. There are also some minor improvements and a list of little bugs that have been fixed.

Changelog

Changes on Android and iOS

• Spanish translation.
• Turkish translation (this has partially been enabled before by accident).
• Spectrum experiments now have a peak frequency history plot.
• The apply-zoom dialog when leaving a graph now defaults to “reset”, but remembers if you want to keep the zoom for the next time.
• Fix: Remote interface breaks if NaN / null values are to be plotted. (Typically in frequency history or Doppler effect experiments)

Changes on Android

• Fix for Bluetooth Experiments failing to load if using specific conversion functions on many Android devices.
• Fix Bluetooth input conversion “formattedString” failing when using indices without explicitly specifying empty labels.
• Fix: GPS experiments crash on phone that do not offer a network-based location service.
• Fix black background of graph toolbar on some devices (i.e. Pixel 3).

Changes on iOS

• Fix unresponsive Bluetooth scan result dialog.
• Fix for Bluetooth: Pick write with/without response depending on peripheral’s capabilities.
• Fix Bluetooth input conversion “formattedString” failing when using labels (this is different than the similar Android fix).
• Fix for crash when sending an empty /control or /export request to the remote access webserver.

File format version 1.9

• New Bluetooth device atttribute “mtu” to request a specific MTU size.
• Support for new sensor type “attitude”.

A little footnote, in case someone is wondering: Spanish is a great example for which the concept of representing languages with flags fails miserably. None of the translators above comes from Spain, so just using the Spanish flag feels rather unfair and wrong, but it needs to be in the picture as it is the one that is best associated with the language. Then which other flags to include? Well, I chose the ones matching our translators, but there is a long list of countries that might feel left out when just looking at the picture…

The ars legendi faculty award for excellent academic teaching in mathematics and science is being awarded for the seventh time by the Stifterverband, the German Mathematical Society (DMV), the German Physical Society (DPG), the German Chemical Society (GDCh) and the society biology, bio sciences and bio medicine in Germany (VBIO). This yearly award is selected in the categories bio science, chemistry, mathematics and physics. It is the latter one, in which Professor Christoph Stampfer and Dr. Sebastian Staacks from the 2nd Institute of Physics and Professor Heidrun Heinke from the 1st Institute of Physics of the RWTH Aachen University received this year’s award for developing and disseminating the physics app “phyphox”.

By developing and continuously improving this app, the team permanently improved physics education in schools and academic teaching worldwide. By transforming common smartphones with their extensive sensor capabilities into powerful miniature laboratories, phyphox creates entirely new possibilities for teaching physics. Students of classical lectures can be drawn into an active role by contributing to experimentation that originally was only done as a demonstration on stage.

Website of the ars legendy faculty award (Stifterverband)
Press article of the RWTH Aachen University