Digital tools
There are lots of digital tools you can use to support practical work and learning: drawing graphs, simulations, and data collection. Here we list some of our favourites.
Simulations are a powerful way to demonstrate and help students come to understand phenomena. We include them wherever possible, and make some simulations ourselves too!
PhET - a long-standing, well-funded project from the University of Colorado. Many excellent simulations, backed by cognitive science research
Physics Aviary - most are Labs, allowing students to make measurements from their screens
Duffy simulations - tend to be a bit simple, but useful for showing different effects not covered by PhET
oPhysics - some very nice simulations, largely created in GeoGebra
Traditionally, we have suggested making graphs using Vernier or Pasco software (which isn't free) or using a spreadsheet like Excel or Sheets (which don't do error bars correctly). Nowadays, there are many good online tools for making graphs.
nPlot - created by a physics teacher in the USA, designed to promote good scientific practices; to draw IB-style max and min slopes, add a linear best-fit line to some data and hit “annotate”
Beep boop machine - makes a simple graph with error bars, linear best-fit line, and max and min slopes
GeoGebra - an excellent tool for graphing (and much more beyond that)
Motion tracking is a powerful way to connect the motion of an object to kinematics graphs and opens the door to lots of investigations.
JSTrack - a straightforward motion tracking app; works best if you upload relatively short, small mp4 files
Sigmund - a motion tracking app from the author of nPlot
Tracker online - an online implementation of the original Tracker software from the 90s
These tools use the sensors in a smartphone or tablet to measure all sorts of things. Great for IA work!