Interactive modeling activities in the classroom - rotational motion and smartphone gyroscopes

The wide-spread availability of smartphones makes them a valuableaddition to the measurement equipment in both the physics classroom andthe instructional laboratory, encouraging an active interaction betweenmeasurements and modeling activities. In this paper we illustrate thisinteraction by making use of the internal gyroscope of a smartphone to studyand measure the rotational dynamics of objects rotating about a fixed axis.The workflow described in this paper has been tested in a classroom settingand found to encourage an exploratory approach to both data collecting andmodeling.