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Seeing How Fitting Process Works

A common problem in teaching Physics in secondary school is due to the gap in terms of difficulty between the physical concepts and the mathematical tools which are necessary to study them quantitatively. Advanced statistical estimators are commonly introduced only a couple of years later than some common physical topics, such as e.g. the electronic circuit analysis. Filling this gap with alternative methods appears to be opportune, in order to let the students reach a full comprehension of the issue they are facing with. In this work we use a smartphone camera and GeoGebra to propose a visual method for understanding the physical meaning of a fitting process. The time constant of an RC circuit is estimated by fitting the discharge curve of a capacitor visualized on the screen of an oscilloscope.