The social distancing rules during the Covid-19 quarantine period posed new challenges in the teaching of physics especially for the laboratory sessions. One solution, that permitted students to carry on the experimental work during this period, was the ‘do it at home’ activities using simple materials for setting up the experiment and a smartphone as a measuring device. In this line of reasoning an educational intervention was designed and carried out in a junior high school of Athens. After discussing the criteria for selecting the ‘do it at home’ activities assigned to the students the chosen experiments are presented, and the distance education tools that were used for carrying out the intervention are described. The findings and the conclusions were drawn both by the papers submitted by pupils and from a questionnaire that students answered online a few days after the completion of the whole action. Students enjoyed the experimental work and they managed to carry out quite successfully all the required steps despite a few difficulties they had encountered. It is worth mentioning that such ‘do it at home’ experiments could also be possibly used at periods when there is a normal access to a school physics lab and not only in the context of a distance learning environment.

This study seeks to answer the question of how effectively students can use their smartphones as tools for measuring and processing data when they perform physics experiments. The research was conducted in a local secondary school in Athens, Greece. The sample consisted of fifty-two 16-year-old students (10th grade). The students formed 26 pairs, and were asked to perform an experiment using their smartphones for measuring, processing and saving data, and then to email the data file to the researchers. During the implementation, students of each pair completed the steps on a worksheet. Two researchers monitored each pair individually and recorded scores and comments on evaluation sheets. The worksheets, the evaluation sheets, and the experimental data emailed by each pair constituted the data of the present study. The findings of the study show that the integration of students' smart mobile devices in the performance of physics experiments in the classroom or in the school lab is possible without posing particular problems. However, this integration presupposes the proper planning by the teacher and the dedication of appropriate time both for the preparation of the students for the activity, and for the installation of the necessary applications in the devices.