CENCO® AP Physics Lab 1.15: Archimedes Principle and Buoyancy

Draw connections between the displacement method for determining density and the bouyant force.

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.

Virtually all students will have experience finding the density of an irregular object using the displacement method. In this guided-inquiry investigation, students first review this essential skill. In the innovative part 2 of this lab, students once again revisit Hooke’s Law to find the spring constant, k, of a spring. Using partial immersion of hanging masses, they must account for the buoyant force of the displaced water. Eureka!