CENCO® AP Physics Lab 1.10: Discovering Factors that Maintain Static Equilibrium

Determine the coefficient of friction by measuring the minimum angle to keep a ladder from slipping.

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.

Statics can be a difficult concept for students because the forces are often applied at different points and the free body diagram cannot be simplified to a single point. In this inquiry lab, students consider a common statics problem we take for granted: how does friction affect the minimum safe angle to set up a ladder? As students experiment with a ladder model on which masses may be hung at different positions, they begin to experience the physical meaning of resolving forces into their horizontal and vertical components. As always, students report their results using the Claim-Evidence-Reasoning model.