DATA ACQUISITION EXPERIMENTS - A NEW PARADIGM IN TEACHING PHYSICS IN HIGH SCHOOL

Data acquisition means the sampling and the scanning of the real world in order to register data that can be processed by a computer. A data acquisition system contains appropriate sensors that convert any analogical signal to an electrical signal, conditioners for the electrical signal which can then be acquired by data acquisition hardware and the data acquisition board which converts the analogue to digital signal. The acquired digital signal is displayed, analyzed, and stored on a computer using the specific software for data acquisition. We have used LabVIEW, which offers a graphical programming environment optimized for data acquisition and Logger Lite (Logger Pro) from Vernier which is ready made for educational use. We will present some experimental lessons we have developed for Physics, Chemistry and Biology and also for interdisciplinary use (Global Warming). The structure of a lesson is composed from: a short description of the implied phenomenon, a description of the experimental devices and set-up's, an explanation of the way the used sensors are working, some tasks for the users and conclusions.