CENCO® AP Physics Lab 1.13: Harmonic Properties of a Pendulum

Determine the factors that affect the period and energy changes of a pendulum, then calculate g.

Introducing the new CENCO AP Physics lab series!

Ideal for AP Physics 1 and 2, AP Physics C, IB DP Physics, and advanced/honors physics courses, each of the 35 experiments is aligned with the revised College Board AP curriculum. These innovative labs go way beyond traditional exercises, turning real-world scenarios into true guided-inquiry investigations. Students are given a goal, but the investigation is driven by their ideas. As they draw conclusions, students report their results using the Claim-Evidence-Reasoning model. The teacher guides and student manuals are authored and reviewed by AP Physics teachers with decades of combined experience, so you can trust the setups to be successful in your classroom. All labs come complete with instructions and materials for one lab group of 2 to 4 students. For your convenience, labs are packaged to allow you to purchase only what is required for each experiment.

In this three-part investigation, students first review the factors – only one, in fact – that affect the period of a pendulum. In part 2, a well-described experimental design prompts students to rediscover that mechanical energy is always conserved – even when a pendulum’s swing is interrupted. In part 3, students must design an experiment to calculate the acceleration due to gravity, g. As always, students support their claims using the Claim-Evidence-Reasoning method.