Mission to Mars: Teaching Air Pressure with a Smartphone and a Vacuum Pump

You give students a vacuum pump, a bag of household materials, and a smartphone running phyphox. Their task: build a spaceship prototype that will survive the pressure difference between the crew compartment and space. A design-based inquiry experiment published in The Physics Teacher in 2021, and one of the more memorable experiments I have been part of running.

17 September 2021 · 8 min · Sebastian Spicker