CENCO® AP Physics Lab 2.04: Exploring Electrostatics and Coulomb’s Law

Observe how charges affect one another and propose an explanation in terms of charge distribution.

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 take on the traditional electrostatics experiment with an electroscope, students first explore repulsion and attraction of positive and negative charges using clear plastic tape. Then, with a simple pith ball electroscope, students can quantitatively estimate the number of electrons transferred by a charged rod. As with all the CENCO AP Physics Labs, students must support their claims using the Claim-Evidence-Reasoning method.