CENCO® AP Physics Lab 1.11: Exploring a System in Rotation

Optimize the distribution of weights on a wheel, then determine g using a rotational apparatus.

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.

Moment of inertia is typically demonstrated using a big visual device or using a discrepant event rolling cylinders down a ramp. In this experiment, however, students must experiment with different distributions of mass on a rolling system and then intentionally design a configuration to minimize its acceleration. In part 2 of this investigation, students use a rotation apparatus to control a falling mass, thus discovering yet another way do determine the acceleration due to gravity: g.