In the volume entitled "Il coltellino svizzero" (The Swiss Knife, Garzanti, 2020), Annamaria Testa narrates the “story of the barometer” and reminds us how appreciated it was also by linguist Tullio De Mauro, a custodian of precious information on its diffusion in Italy [also see: The Barometer and the Meme].
A university student is asked how to measure the height of a skyscraper with a barometer. The student proposes various answers, but overlooks the canonical one, although he knows it. The story reveals the nature of functional fixedness, the cognitive bias that drives individuals to face issues in a stereotyped, traditional manner. Indeed, universities and other educational institutions should teach students to think freely, innovatively and creatively.
And this is what Physicist Giovanni Organtini does with the School of Physics with Arduino and Smartphone. Now, together with some of his colleagues, he has reproposed the problem of how to measure the height of a building with a smartphone, together with more than sixty other measurements in various pedagogic scenarios as easy, low-cost assignments for children.
"Sixty-one ways to measure the height of a building: an introduction to experimental practices" by F. Bouquet, J. Bobroff, A. Kolli and G. Organtini has been published by IOP Science, the publishing house of the prestigious London-based Institute of Physics.
Prof. Bouquet, from the University of Paris, was a guest of the first edition of the School of Physics in 2016 [see news: Telephone Experiments].
We would like to thank Giovanni Organtini himself for this news from his Twitter feed, where it is dedicated to all the people sceptical about using a smartphone at school. For scientific subjects, mobile phones are powerful tools for making measurements, at no extra cost.
Sixty-one ways to measure the height of a building: an introduction to experimental practices
F. Bouquet, J. Bobroff, A. Kolli and G. Organtini
July 8, 2021
Physics Education, Volume 56, Number 5
