TiltTray: A 3D-Printed Apparatus to Teach Inclined-Plane Physics Through Smartphone Portrait-Landscape Transitions

Today’s students are increasingly immersed in a landscape of screens and handheld digital devices through which a good deal of their interactions with the world around them are mediated. Physics educators, meanwhile, continue to rely on traditional human interactions with the physical world, such as sliding down a ramp or throwing a baseball, in order to illustrate fundamental concepts in physics. Regrettably, these interactions are decreasingly representative of the kinds of everyday activities that our students engage in, reducing their degree of engagement with the material. A new opportunity lies in the behavior of smartphones in response to sustained tilted orientations, which has for some time become a familiar mechanism of interaction between students and many of the mobile apps that they engage with on a daily basis. Here we demonstrate how a methodical investigation of this digital-era mechanism can be used to introduce the inclined plane, a standard topic in most introductory mechanics courses. We also present an open-source 3D-printed apparatus designed to support this investigation and the experiences from well over 1000 students in three different colleges.