CENCO® AP Physics Lab 2.01: Characteristics of Ideal Gases

Use the ideal gas law to determine the ambient pressure in the room.

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.

Most ideal gas law lab exercises use the ambient pressure, as recorded by a barometer, to calculate the moles of gas in a sample. This innovative guided-inquiry lab turns that method on its head. Students design an experiment wherein they capture a small volume of air at ambient pressure, then subject the sample to various external pressures. Extrapolating from a graph, they can determine the ambient pressure. In part 2 of the investigation, students design an experiment to graphically determine the universal gas constant, R, using pressure, volume, and temperature data. A clever trick allows them to determine the number of moles of air in the bottle. As with all the CENCO AP Physics Labs, students must report their claims using the Claim-Evidence-Reasoning method.