News

didacta 2024 in Cologne

The largest trade fair for the education industry in Europe “didacta” opens its doors from February 20 to 24 from 9 am to 6 pm daily. Together with the initiative to promote young STEM teachers („MINT-Lehrkräfte-Nachwuchsförderung“, MILeNa), phyphox will be present in Hall 6 at Stand E081, once again as a so-called special exhibit.

There will be short hands-on sessions for every even hour, including the new phyphox:tools at 12 noon and the latest version of the upcoming new editor at 2 pm. All our dates at didacta can be found in the event search.

Aachen phyphox summer training

On September 8, our Aachen phyphox summer training (in German) will be held again, where the whole phyphox team will present experiments and features around phyphox with talks and workshops. We have some new stuff in the program like a blockly-based experiment editor and more about (our own) wireless sensors.

This year we will return to the lecture hall center “C.A.R.L.” in central Aachen directly at the train station “Aachen West”. Participation is free of charge and possible for half or full day.

Further information and registration at https://phyphox.org/lehre2023/.

LEARNTEC 2023

We’ll be back at LEARNTEC, May 23 – 25. Visit us at technika‘s booth Q40, dmarena, our fantastic host. We will close the fair program on Thursday at 15:30 with “Explore the world with the sensors of your smartphone, tablet or microcontroller” at panel C of school@LEARNTEC.

Georg Kerschensteiner Award

Yesterday, Christoph Stampfer and Sebastian Staacks have received the Georg Kerschensteiner Award for the development of the free app phyphox. The ceremonies took place during the spring meeting of the Condensed Matter Section of the German Physical Society (DPG) in Dresden during the festive session and the award winners’ evening.

With phyphox, science is directly at hand of learners, teachers, researchers and explorers via smart device sensors. Via wireless connections to microcontrollers, the mobile lab can use virtually any external sensor. The by now two times App of the Day (November 13 and February 23) has so far recorded well over three million individual installations and nearly two million volume installations at educational institutions.

The DPG’s Georg Kerschensteiner Award recognizes outstanding achievements in physics didactics or in the teaching of physics. The background and previous award winners can be found on this overview page (in German).

Project Update #2

The second update has unfortunately taken a bit longer and is also more of a kick-off for the upcoming year 🎆:

  • We would like to send a newsletter once a quarter. Initially it is planned in English and German. In addition, there will be a special edition for the (fearless) first ones who sign up for it.
  • We have extended the possibilities to financially support us with donations. For this purpose there is the “phyphox project e.V.”, which exclusively and directly pursues non-profit purposes in the sense of the section “Steuerbegünstigte Zwecke” of the German tax code. The purpose of the association is the promotion of education, science and research with special regard to the app phyphox and its possible applications.
  • We have a page at Patreon and start “lite”. With the first patrons we will think about benefits and “phyphox orange” for 8€…

Project Update #1

We welcome three new phyphox team members: today Mosab Abumezied and Gaurav Tripathee started, Niklas Westermann has been (again) with us already for two weeks.

Mosab will work together with Dominik and Sebastian in the joint project Physik.SMART. This project is funded by the Foundation for Innovation in University Teaching. In cooperation with the University of Applied Sciences Aachen, a comprehensive set of smartphone-based experiments for a typical series of courses on experimental physics will be compiled and evaluated. For this purpose, a concept will be developed on how they can be integrated into the courses and tested along the way. The results will be made available as open source, hardware and educational resources.

From left to right: Sebastian, Marina, Mosab and the professors Effertz, Stampfer, Heinke

Gaurav will support Sebastian in integrating the camera into phyphox. In the end, photometric and spectroscopic evaluations, the reading of measuring instruments and the analysis of movements should be possible. This project is funded by the Joachim Herz Foundation.

Niklas helps in the development of smartphone-based experiments and in the creation of a comprehensive database for existing and future ideas as well as their applications in practice.

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