Uniform and Accelerated Circular Motion with a Smartphone: A No-Code, AI-Generated Browser Laboratory

Abstract

Smartphones have become a standard measurement instrument in the physics laboratory. Their built-in accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, and cameras have been used to investigate a wide range of phenomena in mechanics, and rotational motion in particular has proven especially well-suited to smartphone-based experiments. A recurring limitation, however, is that most experiments rely on precompiled sensor apps whose interfaces cannot be tailored to a specific activity, and until recently creating customized smartphone laboratories required programming knowledge beyond what most physics teachers possess. This paper makes two connected contributions. First, we present a validated smartphone experiment for uniform circular motion (UCM) and uniformly accelerated circular motion (UACM), in which the angular velocity and the angular acceleration are obtained from two independent smartphone channels and checked against independent video analysis with Tracker.10,14 Second, we show that generative AI can serve as a no-code development tool for the physics laboratory: the browser-based application used here was produced entirely through natural-language prompting, with no manual coding, extending to rotational motion the approach we recently introduced for acoustic experiments. The emphasis is therefore not only on what is measured, but also on how the measuring instrument itself was built.