Looking for lab experiments for a High School Physics class

[PaulHSteacher]

I teach high school physics and I am looking for simple labs for my students. The school is moving to a new location in a year or two and our equipment is dismal. I want labs that are simple. Earlier this week, I had the students perform the reaction time test by having one student drop a meter stick and a lab partner catch the meter stick. Using falling distance travelled, they were able to calculate reaction time. This simple free fall experiment only required a meter stick. I am looking for other lab experiments that are at the same level for my students. Any suggestions.

 

[Borg]

My first thought is to look in the Instructables website. A quick check show that they have a section devoted to teachers - https://www.instructables.com/teachers/. If you perform a search for 'physics', it returns results with varying degrees of equipment requirements.

 

[kuruman]

My first thought was, have you considered using a smartphone physics app?

Advantages
1. All high-school students have smartphones.
2. No equipment budget is needed.
3. Good excuse to bring smartphones to class in schools where they are banned.

Disadvantage
Using a smart phone a smartphone in school for something other than physics. It can be remedied by having students perform their experiments outside class and report their findings in class.

Look at https://phyphox.org/experiments for ideas. Shown below is just a couple of simple experiments from the site. There are many more.

Inelastic collision
Determine the initial height and loss of energy of a bouncing ball.
This experiment uses the sound of each bounce to retrieve its timing and calculates the values by assuming that the ball loses the same portion of energy on each bounce.

Centrifugal Acceleration
Explore the relation of angular velocity and centrifugal acceleration using the gyroscope and the accelerometer. (For example when putting your phone into a salad spinner.)

 

[Steve4Physics]

... This simple free fall experiment only required a meter stick. I am looking for other lab experiments that are at the same level for my students. Any suggestions.

From what you have said, it sounds like the students are working at an introductory level.

You might need to improvise a bit but here are a few simple experiments...

1. Find an object’s unknown mass using a ‘see-saw’ balance (e.g. a metre rule resting on pivot). This requires known masses and use of the principle of moments. If you don’t have enough standard masses you can use low-value coins of known mass.

2. A sloping ramp (say a long piece of wood) can be used for measuring the coefficient of static friction between various materials and the wood. Simply measure the angle (or calculate it using trig’) at which slipping starts.

3. Slightly more advanced, experiments with a pendulum offer possibilities from the simple to the more complex. E.g.
- the effect of the mass of the ‘bob’ on the period;
- the effect of the pendulum’s length on the period;
- measuring ‘g’ using a pendulum.
Edit: note, small amplitudes are needed for these experiments,

 

[robphy]

possibly useful set of links
https://physics.tcnj.edu/online-teaching-resources-for-physics-instructors/

I second @kuruman 's suggestion of phyphox .

I had my students ride an elevator and watch a digital scale with a 100g mass sitting on top of it.
As they rode the elevator, i told them to make a video of the scale reading while narrating what the elevator was doing.
Here's part of a sheet that they fill out and circle while riding.
When they return to their desks, they draw the free-body diagram at each stage.

 

[PaulHSteacher]

Thank you much. I tried a board and dry erasure for friction. Both kinetic and static frictions I observed (erasure/board) are the same here in NC and you get a smooth progressive slide making it great to find the sliding angle. However, my students have interests in gaming and cell phones and therefore lack the skill and care to measure rise and/or run. I also had them measure the velocity and reading of a force gauge while dragging a mass across the floor and calculate acceleration with an applied constant force. I had them mark the force gauge with a rubber band and use their loved cell phones and put the 12" floor tiles, force meter and block in the field of view. Using video data, they could record these values and calculate the acceleration. I thought this would be a great lab. I spent a week showing how to catch the floor lines on the edge of the fov and convert the 12 inch tile separation into meters. However, with cell phones in hand, no useable data was taken. I carefully explained and demonstrated that the pulling string had to be steady and horizontal. Their video data looked like a dog tugging on a sock. I instructed the students to view their data using a particular software on their laptops that would provide time resolution. Many were lazy and used their cell phones with ~0.5s time resolution display per frame. I run GoGardian to keep their lines blocked on their laptops. For that reason, there is no video treat for opening their laptop. Back to the ruler lab. It was somewhat successful. I had two student pairs appear to not know that inches and centimeters are different. Some pairs did not carry through units and got ~3.5s delay time. Since it is a short lab, I asked the students to practice the reaction time experiment for 5 minutes. It was ignored. Most got a reaction time of about 0.2s. I call that a success.

 

[robphy]

Another good tool is "Tracker"
https://opensourcephysics.github.io/tracker-website/
which does video analysis.
It can be trained to track a ball (e.g. a bright object that contrasts well from its background).

Ideally, use a tripod, avoid parallax and other optical distortions,
and have a reference scale (like a meterstick in the same plane as the object(s) of interest)
and a reference vertical. (Sometimes I use a ball dropped from rest.)
Sometimes I include an image of a clock (e.g. a web-based stopwatch on a screen).

 

[Steve4Physics]

... Both kinetic and static frictions I observed (erasure/board) are the same here in NC

The coefficient of kinetic friction is generally a bit smaller than the static coefficient. Of course, the laws of physics may vary slightly in NC.

... my students ...lack the skill and care to measure rise and/or run.

Really? They can't use a metre-rule or a tape measure???!

Give them a short measurement exercise. You can make it ‘fun’. E.g. they individually measure the length (l), width (w) and diagonal (d) of a sheet of standard A4 paper and write their results on their sheet. No phones allowed.

No copying, no looking-up sizes or using Pythagoras allowed.

You can also get them to calculate the area (A) in m^2 (no phone or calculator allowed) if you are prepared to be shocked/dismayed!

Then they assemble into small groups and compare individual results within their group. You tell them you want to find out which group can come up with the most accurate values of l, w and d (and A). Each group democratically decides what the group’s answer is.

Each group presents its results to the class and you award the accolade of Most Accurate Group.

 

[PaulHSteacher]

I like that. I will give it a try.

 

[Herman Trivilino]

However, my students have interests in gaming and cell phones and therefore lack the skill and care to measure rise and/or run.

Who's in charge? Skills are something that they are taught, in this case by a teacher. Allowing them to do only what they "care" to do is not a good strategy.

Vernier.com is a good resource.

 

[PaulHSteacher]

Student learning and skill development mostly requires student participation as everyone reading this likely knows. I had a parent tell me that they hired a physics tutor for their child and the child was still doing poorly. I told the parent that if the student was not getting an "A" in a class assisted by a tutor then they should fire the tutor. I hope the parent understood both sides of that statement. When I was in college, I did tutoring for hire. Every student I tutored got an "A" and I tutored many. I realized that not only was I just showing and assisting the students through numerous problems and allowing them to development a skill set, the student wanted to learn.
During a recent "we do" session where the students were both working together and getting help from me, that student had put all of his work away during about the middle of the class period. I asked the student where was their work and I got a mumble and a shoulder shrug. The class is AP physics. I had previously moved the student away from his friends. To the students credit, he was very much focused and participating in his friends conversation across the room.

 

[kuruman]

When I was active teaching I talked turkey to my students about this on the first day. This is what I said.

I cannot guarantee that you will learn anything in this class because if you don't want to learn, you will not. However, I can guarantee that if you do want to learn, you will. Think about where the dividing line between my responsibility to teach and your responsibility to learn lies. I cannot crack your skulls open and stuff them with knowledge.

The unspoken message was, if you don't want to be here, I don't want you here.

 

[PaulHSteacher]

Thank you much. I was called into teaching because my friends saw me having too much fun in my lab. I was told that AP physics consisted of all gifted students and later learned otherwise. I also learned that their maturity level was not near that of college. I am making a list of first week topics. Some close to what you wrote will be discussed.