CENCO® AP Physics Lab 1.08: Conservation of Energy with Negative Work

Determine the spring constant of a spring-powered launcher by analyzing the work done on a system.

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.

Physics students quickly grasp the relationship between kinetic and potential energy for projectiles. Slightly harder is the relationship between potential energy in a spring being transferred to kinetic energy of another object. Harder still is including work done by friction. In this guided-inquiry lab, students design two different experiments to determine the spring constant of a spring scale using a ramp and a hockey puck. Game on! As always, students produce a Claim-Evidence-Reasoning report to support their findings.