Many balances familiar to students, such as bathroom or grocery store scales are examples of spring balances. Hooke’s Law defines the relationship between the force applied to a spring or other elastic material to the distance it stretches or compresses. In this module, students will set up and conduct experiments to test the validity of the relationship.
Many children today have only experienced digital weighing devices, black boxes that with the touch of a button magically display the weight of an item. This low cost, easy to prepare exercise lets children experience how people measured mass for thousands of years.
Your students’ data is imperfect …the activity is ruined? Not at all! It’s actually a fantastic opportunity to teach some critical concepts about data collection and analysis. Those imperfections can actually reveal a lot about the system being studied, the measurement tools involved, and the experimenters themselves!