Your momentum might change if you knew that you could cover your physics course, start to finish, with Carolina’s top-selling physics kits. These 10 kits offer students hands-on experiments, model generation, and data analysis, while meeting your physics course standards. Repeatedly chosen by thousands of teachers, these kits can help you electrify your students’ lab experiences.
Carolina® Introduction to Force and Motion
Introduce students to Newton’s laws and explore the important force and motion concepts of friction, velocity, acceleration, collision, and momentum through engaging hands-on activities. Test surfaces for friction. Investigate how an incline affects the force needed to move an object. Crash dynamic carts and pull Hall’s cars to study collision, momentum, and acceleration.
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Carolina STEM Challenge®: Egg Drop
Students learn about momentum, collisions, impulse, and stopping force as they address the engineering challenge, How can a container be built to protect fragile cargo during a collision? Teams start by building cubic, triangular, and cylindrical egg containers, dropping them from increasing heights while evaluating their effectiveness at protecting an egg from damage. Students apply what they have learned to achieve the highest drop in which the egg remains intact, competing in one of 4 design challenges: Single Drop, Three Sides Drop, Limited Mass Drop, or Limited Volume Drop.
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Carolina® Introduction to Momentum and Collisions
Students investigate the relationship between mass, velocity, and momentum with particular focus on linear momentum conservation of 2 bodies before and after a straight-line collision. They will predict the response of colliding steel spheres in Newton’s cradle, calculate the momentum of a rolling steel sphere before its collision with a stationary steel sphere, and compare pre-collision momentum of the rolling steel sphere with the sum of momenta for the 2 spheres after the collision. These activities provide an excellent opportunity to incorporate classroom data analysis technologies such as video and photogates.
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Carolina® Introduction to Waves
The human-driven wave common at many stadium-held sporting events serves as the phenomenon for this lab. Students investigate and model stadium waves, sound waves, light waves, seismic waves, and standing waves. They use their models to explain that energy, not matter, is propagated by waves, and establish the relationships between wave frequency, wavelength, and wave speed and the relationship between wave energy and amplitude.
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Carolina STEM Challenge®: Passive Solar Design
Students apply their knowledge of electromagnetic radiation, energy, and energy transfer to solve this engineering problem, What are some ways that buildings can be made more energy efficient using the sun’s energy directly? Teams complete a prototype activity during which they build and test a model of a small vacation home. In the design challenge, students build and test exterior features on their model houses so that the interior will remain cool when the summer sun shines at an angle of 70°.
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Carolina® Introduction to Magnetism
Study the nature of magnetism and its relationship to electricity by investigating magnetism, magnetic fields, and magnetic lines of force. Students learn about magnetic domains and how temporary and permanent magnets differ. They build a circuit, observe current creating its own magnetic field, and then use the circuit to make an electromagnet.
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Carolina® Introduction to Electromagnetism
Students build and experiment with 3 different types of electromagnets: coiled wire, metal core, and solenoid. Students observe that an electric current creates a magnetic field and learn how to increase the field’s strength by changing the length of wire, number of coils, and amount of electric current. They learn how electromagnets power everyday devices and build a simple motor and a working audio speaker.
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Carolina® Laser Music Demonstration
Students investigate how information is embedded in waves with modulation to encode an audio signal in a laser beam using a transformer. Students delve into electronic components as they observe electromagnetic induction as a transformer amplifies an audio signal, which is then transmitted across the room via a laser pointer, converted by a photovoltaic cell into electricity, and finally converted back into an audio signal through a dynamic speaker acting as a transducer. The activity effectively illustrates the roles that the components play in encoding and decoding information and transforming energy from one form to another.
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Carolina® First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics
Place a hot beverage outside on a cold day. Soon, the beverage cools to the temperature of the surrounding air. The colder the air, the faster the cooling seems to occur. Likewise, a cold beverage taken outside on a hot day warms to the ambient temperature. What determines how heat is transferred between objects and how quickly the transfer happens? What can that simple phenomenon tell us about energy transfer in general and about more complex systems that use heat to perform work?
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Carolina STEM Challenge®: Keep It Hot
Students apply their knowledge of heat and heat transfer to solve this engineering problem, How can we design a device that minimizes heat transfer better than a foam cup? Students initially research the relevant scientific concepts and then construct a prototype. During the prototyping activity, students evaluate the insulating properties of paper and foam cups using their data and graphs. Design teams then apply their skills, prior knowledge, and available materials to engineer a system in which a paper cup can be made to insulate as well as, or better than, a foam cup. Testing, data collection, and analysis drive the design process.
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These are our top-selling physics kits. Whether it’s forces and motion, waves and electromagnetic radiation, electricity and electronics, or energy transfer and thermodynamics, get your students energized and moving with hands-on activities that work and reduce your workload at the same time. Use them to help make your students’ path to success easier. Need more information? We’re always happy to answer your questions and provide a personalized quote.
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