Project teaching beyond Physics: Integrating Arduino to the laboratory

This work reports a joint project executed by the Department of Electronics of a Federal Institution in Brazil and a public high school. During the second semester of 2015, we accomplished a set of Physics experiments in the areas of Optics, Thermodynamics, and Waves. The Arduino platform was part of the acquisition and control setup for a set of experiments. Two hundred students from six classes took part in the activities. A post-course survey indicates that students appreciated the project, with more than 94% of them answering that experiments were “interesting” or “very interesting”, although their perception of Physics as a difficult subject has not changed.