There are situations in which physics students would profit from the performance of real quantitative experiments but the equipment is lacking, expensive, or too bulky. One such situatuation is in distance education courses, where the desire to have students perform real experiments is outweighed by cost and/or logistics. The result often is a resort to simulated experiments, or incurring the expense of bringing students to a central location for a marathon session of lab exercises, many of which are done out of sequence. I describe here five quantitative experiments designed for an introductory DE course in physics, that require almost nothing in the way of equipment except a computer and items commonly found in the home.
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