CENCO® AP Physics Lab 1.09: Conservation of Momentum of a Collision

Determine the speed of a toy dart by analyzing the results of different inelastic collisions.

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 wildly fun lab, students answer a meaningful question about a common toy: how fast is the foam dart moving when it leaves the launcher? Instead of a traditional ballistic pendulum, toy cars are used to catch the projectile. In this true guided-inquiry activity, students get the materials and the questions, but they must then apply what they know about kinematics, energy balances, and conservation of momentum to design multiple experiments. Students report their findings using the Claim-Evidence-Reasoning method.