Building the Experiment, Building Understanding: Student-Built Arduino Experiments for Teaching Damped Oscillations in Secondary Physics

The use of microcontrollers in school physics laboratories is typically associated with automated data collection and immediate graphical display. Less often examined are instructional conditions in which students actively participate in assembling, basic programming, calibrating, and testing the apparatus before using it to investigate a physical phenomenon. This study examined the learning outcomes associated with such an approach to teaching damped oscillations. A quasi-experimental pretest–posttest design with nonequivalent groups was adopted. Participants comprised 105 Grade 12 students from five schools, divided in three groups: an active control group that completed conventional laboratory activities and observed brief demonstrations of microcontroller applications (CG, n = 27), an experimental group that built and used an Arduino apparatus (EG1, n = 43), and a second experimental group that followed the same procedure with the additional use of a digital simulation (EG2, n = 35). The intervention lasted eight class periods, and achievement was assessed with a 30-item instrument covering three distinct cognitive domains: understanding physical concepts related to damped oscillations, functional knowledge of microcontrollers and Arduino, and the ability to read and physically interpret graphs. The mean total gain was 6.78 points in the CG, 19.44 in EG1, and 20.43 in EG2. ANCOVA results showed that, after controlling for the corresponding pretest score, the final performance of EG1 and EG2 was higher than that of the CG in all three cognitive domains (p < .001 for all analyses), whereas the differences between EG1 and EG2 were not statistically significant. Overall, the findings indicated that the instructional condition involving student construction and use of the apparatus was associated with higher cognitive performance than the control condition, whereas adding the simulation did not appear to yield additional learning gains.