Simple Experiments in Physics Teaching and Learning: Do They Have Any Perspectives?

Abstract

Being cheap, requiring just a short time and often providing interesting results, simple experiments have been used in physics classes for a long time. However, can they compete with what nowadays ICT, modern technologies and the Internet offer to us and our students in more and more attractive forms and formerly unimaginable range and quality? Or are they rather obsolete and, metaphorically speaking, “endangered species”? The purpose of the chapter is to defend the opinion that “simple experiments are not dead”. To do it, we try to look at them from a more general point of view offering sometimes maybe unorthodox but hopefully interesting views and perspectives. We claim and demonstrate that simple experiments are “not stupid” (i.e. they are challenging at many levels, enable even quantitative measurements, etc.), adaptable (here, we borrow, rather as metaphors, some ideas from evolution biology), multipurpose tools that can teach us a lot (not only facts) and, finally, though they can serve many purposes, they are also valuable just by themselves. These general ideas and views are supplemented and illustrated by examples of series of simple experiments from various parts of physics: electrostatics, charges and currents, sound and waves, magnetism and mechanics. About twenty experiments are presented, some of them hopefully in new or not so known variants. From all these considerations and examples we conclude that simple experiments will stay with us and we will use and enjoy them in physics education even in times to come.