CENCO® AP Physics Lab 2.14: Determining the Velocity of a Wave on a String

Explore a standing wave on a string and determine the linear mass density of the string.

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 to world scenarios into true guided to 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 to Evidence to 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 experiment, students design an experiment to determine the linear density of a string using the formula for a standing wave. They must develop a method for measuring the wavelength of a standing wave for various tension forces, then present their findings graphically. As with our other AP Physics labs, students support their conclusions using the Claim-Evidence-Reasoning method, and practice graph linearization in the process.