Finding planets around other stars sounds like it requires a space telescope. It does not — at least not the analogy version. This is the story of how a lamp, a ball, and a smartphone became a peer-reviewed physics classroom experiment, published in The Physics Teacher in 2024.
Every classroom treatment of exoplanet detection focuses on the transit method. What gets omitted is that moons of exoplanets could also host life — and that with a small motor and a slight modification to the standard transit experiment, you can show students what an exomoon signature looks like in a light curve. Published in MNU Journal in 2023.
A unit for lower secondary physics classes (grades 8–10) on detecting exoplanets with analogy experiments. Published in Unterricht Physik in 2023, it starts where students’ misconceptions are — with the (wrong) assumption that you can just look at exoplanets through a telescope — and works forward from there.
In spring 2020, the astro-lab at the University of Cologne shut down like everything else. The question was whether you could replicate a hands-on student lab using smartphones and household materials — and send it home. This is the story of how we tried, what we published in CAPjournal, and what happened when schools reopened.
Stellar evolution is now in the NRW physics curriculum, but there are almost no direct experiments you can do with it. Two responses: some DIY smartphone experiments for stellar formation, and a board game called “Staub und Sterne” (Dust and Stars) that lets students play through the stellar lifecycle. Both grew from the astro-lab project at the University of Cologne.
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.