3 Distributed Home Labs at the Time of the Covid 27 Fig. 3.6 Some tests from the students’ projects: vibrations produced by a coffee machine (left), kinematics of a salad spinner (middle), drilling machine (right) Fig. 3.7 Vibration measurements on a pedestrian bridge in Milano A number of students have recorded the acceleration of the floor or the noise related to living in close proximity of trains, heavy traffic or subway lines, trying to point out if any prevailing frequency component was present. One student developed a simple anti-intrusion system based on the recognition of a change in the RMS acceleration value at the floor while someone walked in the room. In the end, a student decided to put her smartphone in a salad spinner (Fig. 3.6) and by measuring the accelerations produced by the three axis MEMS accelerometer has tried to reconstruct on her own one of the experiences which is part of the standard packet in Phyphox. 3.7 Final Remarks and Conclusions Helping students with their projects demands a remarkable effort by the instructors and by the students themselves, but the continuous discussions have helped in better fixing the course contents and have made the final exam easier and smoother, starting from the project presentation. Even if it is difficult to compare the final results with those of the preceding years, due to the strong differences in the exam organization, results over around 200 tests have been slightly better this year than in the past. Students demonstrated to be satisfied anyway, and in a form, they have been asked to fill after closing their exam, on one side they claimed real classroom lessons, as these were anyway preferred; on the other side, they wrote they did not really think that they learned less due to the lack of laboratory.
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