CENCO® AP Physics Lab 1.12: Harmonic Properties of a Mass-Spring System

Determine the spring constant of a spring using two methods.

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 guided-inquiry version of two classic experiments, students must design the experiment and report their results using the Claim-Evidence-Reasoning method. In part 1, students use Hooke’s Law to determine the spring constant, k, of a harmonic motion spring. In part 2, they determine k by measuring the period of oscillation. Students report the results of both experiments graphically, performing linearization where appropriate.