This study aims to demonstrate how the average speed of a light-emitting toy car may be determined
using a smartphone’s light sensor. The freely available Android smartphone application, ‘
AndroSensor ’, was used for the experiment. The classroom experiment combines complementary physics
knowledge of optics and kinematics to find the average speed of a moving object. The speed of the
toy car is found by determining the distance between the light-emitting toy car and the smartphone,
and the time taken to travel these distances. To ensure that the average speed of the toy car
calculated with the help of the AndroSensor was correct, the average speed was also calculated by
analyzing video-recordings of the toy car. The resulting speeds found with these different methods
were in good agreement with each other. Hence, it can be concluded that reliable measurements of the
average speed of light-emitting objects can be determined with the help of the light sensor of an
Android sma…