The gyroscope in a smartphone was employed in a physics laboratory setting to verify the conservation of angular momentum and the nonconservation of rotational kinetic energy. As is well-known, smartphones are ubiquitous on college campuses. These devices have a panoply of built-in sensors. This creates a unique opportunity for a new paradigm in the physics laboratory. Many traditional physics experiments can now be performed very conveniently in a pedagogically enlightening environment while simultaneously reducing the laboratory budget substantially by using student-owned smartphones.