The wide-spread availability of smartphones makes them a valuable addition to the measurement
equipment in both the physics classroom and the instructional laboratory, encouraging an active
interaction between measurements and modeling activities. In this paper we illustrate this
interaction by making use of the internal gyroscope of a smartphone to study and measure the
rotational dynamics of objects rotating about a fixed axis. The workflow described in this paper has
been tested in a classroom setting and found to encourage an exploratory approach to both data
collecting and modeling.