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The Ubiquitous-Physics (U-Physics) app was upgraded to help students in learning inclined plane concepts. The new version of U-Physics allows students to see the experimental data not only in a graphical representation but also in a tabular representation. U-Physics provides a whiteboard function to support data explanations. The study investigated the differences between experimental students who use U-Physics (EG) and control students who do not use the app (CG) in terms of learning achievements. Additionally, we studied the free body diagram ability of students by giving them a test and analyzed its relationship to inquiry behaviors (interpreting graphs, applying formulas, and drawing conclusions) and learning achievements. Two 11th-grade classes (EG = 15 and CG = 32) participated in this quasi-experimental design. Our findings showed that the students who use U-Physics performed better than those who do not use the app in terms of learning achievements. Inquiry behaviors have a significant correlation with students’ learning achievements, and drawing conclusions is a predictor to affect students’ learning achievements. Additionally, most students agreed that U-Physics is beneficial for their physics learning. Thus, we strongly suggest teachers to use U-Physics and involve inquiry behaviors in physics laboratories to enhance students’ inquiry thinking and learning achievements while conducting physics experiments.

In this study, we designed and developed an app called Ubiquitous-Physics (U-Physics) for mobile devices like tablet PC or smart phones to help students learn the principles behind a simple pendulum in Physics. The unique characteristic of U-Physics is the use of sensors on mobile devices to collect acceleration and velocity data during pendulum swings. The data collected are transformed to facilitate students’ understanding of the pendulum time period. U-Physics helped students understand the effects of pendulum mass, length, and angle in relation to its time period. In addition, U-Physics was equipped with an annotation function such as textual annotation to help students interpret and understand the concepts and phenomena of the simple pendulum. U-Physics also generated graphs automatically to demonstrate the time period during which the pendulum was swinging. Results showed a significant positive correlation between interpreting graphs and applying formula. This finding indicated that the ability to interpret graphs has an important role in scientific learning. Therefore, we strongly recommend that physics teachers use graphs to enrich students’ information content and understanding and negative correlation between pair coherence and interpreting graphs. It may be that most of the participants (vocational high school students) have limited skill or confidence in physics problem solving; so, they often seek help from teachers or their high-achieving peers. In addition, the findings also indicated that U-Physics can enhance students’ achievement during a 3-week time period. We hope that this app can be globally used to learn physics in the future.