At the end of the practical students were again required to do the standardized test on circuits and complete a survey on their experience of the use of the iPad and iCircuit app. Twenty three iPads were distributed among students on a practical afternoon in order for them to do the circuit simulations in groups (of 4–5 students). The practical was repeated three afternoons per week over an eight week period. Each E1 practical involved ~50 students in a three hour session. The E1 practical required students to solve DC circuit problems by means of physically constructing circuits, algebraically using Kirchhoff's Rules and Ohm's Law, and by means of simulating circuits using the app iCircuit running on iPads (iOS platform). As the semester progressed students were exposed to a practical (E1), lectures, a prescribed textbook, a tutorial and online videos focusing on DC circuits. The pre-test therefore served to probe students' school level knowledge of DC circuits. Students answered the pre-test having no university-level formal exposure to DC circuits in theory or practice. For ease of reference we call this test the pre-test. Students were required to first complete the standardized test at the start of semester (July 2015). The instrument comprises 29 multiple choice questions that students have to answer in ~40 min. Students' understanding of DC resistive circuits was probed by means of a standardized test instrument. The study involved 366 students enrolled in the physics (bio) 154 module at Stellenbosch University in 2015. This is a non-calculus based physics module for students in the life sciences stream. We report here on a study we conducted of this understanding, where the cohort consisted of students in a large-enrollment first-year physics module. Probing university students' understanding of direct-current (DC) resistive circuits is still a field of active physics education research.
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