conceptual-understanding

Algebra Help

So we’re just over 1/3 of the way through Physics 11. Despite my intentions to ward off predictable problems, they nevertheless continue to appear. One of them is Hooke’s Law. My students did a lab to see the relationship between force and how a spring reacts to the applied force. They could graph the relationship and figured out that the slope was the stiffness of the spring. Most students also go an equation of the line from their graphs and I helped this process along by generalizing the equation to Fs = kx, aka “Hooke’s Law.