Efficient Sound Card Based Experimention At Different Levels Of Natural Science Education

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how standard computer sound cards can be repurposed as cost-effective measurement tools for science education, with open-source software and sensor interfacing examples.

Contribution

It introduces practical methods and open-source software for connecting sensors to sound cards, enabling accessible experiments in natural science education.

Findings

Sound cards can be effectively used as measurement tools.

Open-source software supports various sensor-based experiments.

Practical applications include photogates, stopwatches, and temperature measurement.

Abstract

Sound cards, which count as standard equipment in today's computers, can be turned into measurement tools, making experimentation very efficient and cheap. The chief difficulties to overcome are the lack of proper hardware interfacing and processing software. Sound-card experimentation becomes really viable only if we demonstrate how to connect different sensors to the sound card and provide suitable open-source software to support the experiments. In our talk, we shall present a few applications of sound cards in measurements: photogates, stopwatches and an example of temperature measurement and registration. We also provide the software for these applications.