  There are diverse teaching methodologies to promote both collaborative and
individual work in undergraduate physics courses. However, few educational
studies seek to understand how students learn and apply new knowledge through
open-ended activities that require mathematical modeling and experimentation
focused on environmental problems. In this work, we propose a novel home
experiment to simulate the dynamics of a particulate under temperature
inversion and model it as damped harmonic motion. Twenty six first year
students enrolled in STEM majors answered six qualitative questions after
designing and developing the experiment. These questions helped analyze the
students epistemological beliefs about their learning process of physics topics
and its applications. Results showed that this type of open-ended experiments
could facilitate the students understanding of physics phenomena. In addition,
this experiment showed that it could help physics professors to promote
students epistemological development by giving their students the opportunity
to search for different sources of knowledge and becoming self-learners instead
of looking at the professor as the epistemological authority. At the end,
students described this activity as a positive experience that helped them
realize alternative ways to apply physics topics in different contexts of their
environment.
