This study is a first attempt to investigate effectiveness of smartphone-based activities on
students’ conceptual understanding of acceleration. 143 secondary school students (15–16 years old)
were involved in two types of activities: smartphone- and non-smartphone activities. The latter
consisted in data logging and ‘cookbook’ activities. For the sake of comparison, all activities
featured the same phenomena, i.e., the motion on an inclined plane and pendulum oscillations. A
pre-post design was adopted, using open questionnaires as probes. Results show only weak statistical
differences between the smartphone and non-smartphone groups. Students who followed smartphone
activities were more able to design an experiment to measure acceleration and to correctly describe
acceleration in a free fall motion. However, students of both groups had many difficulties in
drawing acceleration vector along the trajectory of the studied motion. Results suggest that
smartphone-based activities m…