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Material Detail

Masses and Springs Lab

Masses and Springs Lab

A simulation of masses hung from a scale including gravity. Virtual lab tools, including a ruler and a stopwatch can be used to make quantitative measurements. Friction and spring constants can be adjusted, and energy graphed.

Key topics:  Hooke's Law, Springs, Conservation of Energy, Measuring Mass and Gravity

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Keywords:
Mass and Gravity, Hooke's Law, Conservation of Energy
Disciplines:
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More about this material

Material Type:
Simulation
Date Added to MERLOT:
February 11, 2004
Date Modified in MERLOT:
December 17, 2020
Author:
 
Submitter:
Bruce Mason
Primary Audience:
Grade School, Middle School, High School, College General Ed
Technical Format:
Website, Flash
Mobile Compatibility:
Not specified at this time
Language:
English
Cost Involved:
No
Source Code Available:
No
Accessibility Information Available:
Unknown
Creative Commons:
No

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Comments

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Christopher Wentworth
Christopher Wentworth (Faculty)
14 years ago
This Flash applet is rich with possibilities for creating interactive class/lab experiences for introductory physics students. Students can change the force constant of the spring, the amount of friction, the attached mass, the amount of initial displacement, and the gravitational acceleration. The time of the motion can be measured with a "stopwatch", and the different kinds of energy, kinetic, gravitational potential, elastic potential, and thermal, can be observed in real time on a bar graph. There are also some "unknown" masses that can be attached to the springs. If you back track on the link you can locate some suggested activities. It would be nice to add the capability of graphing the attached weight's position as a function of time.

Technical Remarks:

Instructors should use the more recent version of this application available at http://phet.colorado.edu/sims/mass-spring-lab/mass-spring-lab_en.html rather than the one currently linked in MERLOT, as the updated version corrects some labels.
Time spent reviewing site: ~1 hour