Efficient deployment of experiments?

[Jens Noriʇzsɔɥ]

Some late additions to Fred’s answer:

When working on the phyphox file, I felt that it was a bit cumbersome to edit the file, and transfer that file to the smart phone and install it there. There are plenty of ways to transfer a file: By sending an email, by airdropping it (for ios), by using a cloud storage service like google cloud or sharepoint, by using the OneDrive app or other file syncing tools, ... 

Reading the article about how to transfer experiments, I got the impression that these approaches do not always work robustly, and that the recommended way is to use a direct download link to the phyphox file, replacing https:// with phyphox://, and converting that URL into a QR Code. All this requires some steps, which I felt were a bit annoying. As I work with students, I would like to suggest to them one robust way that works for everybody.

The article is rather old and things (hopefully) changed in this regard – particularly on Android, iOS should always have been fine. My personal workflow is editing on iCloud and open the .phyphox results in files on my handhelds. In workshops, I use either airdrop (schools overwhelmingly use iPads here) or share a QR-Code to a file on our ownCloud variant.

Firstly, I would like to ask: what is the most efficient way to deploy a new phyphox file to the app? Have I missed something?

Secondly, I would like to suggest an improvement: In the phyphox editor, we miss the possibility to modify or upload an existing phyphox file (XML) and to directly convert it into a QR code there. This possibility (linking an XML via a QR code) seems to be in place already for the XMLs created within the editor. But one cannot edit this XML directly.

The most efficient way is by QR code to an online file that could be hosted almost anywhere. You just need to take care that the hoster directly provides the file. GitHub and ownCloud, for instance, can do that. Local hosting should not be a problem for universities and schools tend to restrict outbound access that would require it anyway.

There are free tools for creating QR codes. QRCode Monkey is neat, nowadays I prefer a (really) free service of the German federal state Lower Saxony https://qr.kits.blog/ (in German).

Please note that the editor is quite outdated and might not handle files on import that well. A new blockly based editor is on its way.