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AP Physics C: Mechanics
2008 – 2009
Cary Hylton

Brief Description of Course
AP Physics C: Mechanics is an in-depth course in physics that corresponds to the a first semester
course in mechanics for engineering and physical science majors at a university. It is designed as a second year course for students interested in deepening their understanding of physics. Since
differential and integral calculus will be used throughout the course students should have already
completed or be concurrently enrolled in AP Calculus. Topics in Newtonian mechanics explored in the first year course will be studied in greater depth and with an emphasis on analysis and problem solving.

Approximately twenty percent of class time will be spent on laboratory activities. In some cases students will be required to design their own experiments and in every case there will be opportunities to collect, organize, evaluate, and analyze data. Students will be asked to interpret lab results and to make inferences and generalizations from their observations. A lab notebook is required and will be graded. Twenty-five percent of the student’s grade will come from lab work.

Learning is student focused and each student is responsible for his own success. The teacher acts as a guide and facilitator to student learning. The teacher will frequently use discrepant events or demonstrations that produce unexpected or puzzling results to stimulate thought and discussion. Students will work together with lab partners or in small lab groups as appropriate, participate in class and small group discussions, and complete daily homework assignments as well as longer-term assignments and projects.

Each term there will be a term project that students will be expected to complete. Often these
projects and labs are open-ended and may lead in unexpected directions. The goal is for students to apply the concepts and strategies they learn in this course to novel situations. Students should become experienced in both expanding the specific to the general and in reducing general concepts to specific problems.

The final grade will be calculated as follows: Homework: 25%; Labs and projects: 25%;
Quizzes and Exams: 50%

Unit Information
Unit Name or Timeframe:
Term 1
Unit 1: Measurement and Motion Along a Straight Line (9 block periods or about 4 weeks)
Topics: The nature of physics, SI units and unit conversions, significant figures, displacement, average and instantaneous velocity (including differentiation), average and instantaneous acceleration, graphical analysis of motion (including slopes of tangent lines), free-fall and other constant acceleration examples.
Labs: "Grandfather Clock," an introduction to the lab using a graphical analysis of pendulum length to period; "Analysis of Uniformly Accelerated Motion," the measurement of acceleration as a glider slides down an inclined air track.

Unit 2: Vectors and Motion in Two and Three Dimensions (13 block periods or about 5 weeks)
Topics: Vector addition; vector components; unit vectors; using graphing calculators to solve vector problems; displacement, velocity, and acceleration in more than one dimension; independence of motion; projectile motion; uniform circular motion; reference frames and relative motion (including an introduction to special relativity as time permits).
Labs: "Vector Addition on Maps," an introduction to vector addition; "Force Table Equilibrant" to calculate and verify the equilibrant of three randomly selected force vectors; "Water-balloon Launching" to predict and measure range in projectile motion.

Term 2
Unit 3: Force and Motion I & II (13 block periods or about 5 weeks)
Topics: Force, inertia, Newton’s laws of motion, weight, normal force, friction, tension, free-body diagrams, air resistance, centripetal force, fundamental forces.
Labs: "Atwood’s Machine," to verify and evaluate Newton’s laws of motion; "Static and Kinetic
Friction," to evaluate the effects of weight and surface composition on coefficients of friction;
"Centripetal Force," to explore the effects of force, mass, and radius on an object moving in circular motion.

Unit 4: Work and Kinetic Energy and Conservation of Energy ( 9 block periods or about 4 weeks)
Topics: Work, dot products, Hooke’s law and work done by a variable force (including integration), kinetic energy, work-energy theorem, power, conservative and nonconservative forces, gravitational and elastic potential energy, law of conservation of energy, potential energy curves and equilibrium.
Labs: "Mechanical Forces and Spring Constants," to investigate the relationship between a force
stretching a spring and the spring constant; "Work and Energy," to determine the work done on an object by integrating under the curve on a force-position graph.

Term 3
Unit 5: Systems of Particles and Collisions (9 block periods or about 4 weeks)
Topics: Center of mass, Newton’s second law for a system of particles, linear momentum,
conservation of linear momentum, impluse, impluse-linear momentum theorem, elastic and inelastic collisions in one and two dimensions.
Labs: "Ballistic Pendulum," to use conservation of energy and conservation of linear momentum to find the muzzle velocity of a ball fired from a projectile launcher; "Conservation of Momentum," to verify the law of conservation of momentum in two-dimensional elastic collisions.

Unit 6: Rotation, Rolling, Torque, and Angular Momentum (11 block periods or about 4 1/2 weeks)
Topics: Angular displacement, velocity, and acceleration; rotational inertia; rotational kinetic energy; torque; cross products; Newton’s second law in angular form; rolling; angular momentum; conservation of angular momentum.
Labs: "Moment of Inertia," to measure the moments of inertia of a variety of ojects using a pulley
system; "Angular Momentum," using gyroscopes and a variety of other spinning objects to investigate the effects of angular momentum and its conservation.

Term 4
Unit 7: Gravitation and Oscillations (11 block periods or about 4 1/2 weeks)
Topics: Newton’s law of universal gravitation; priciple of superposition; gravitational field;
gravitational potential energy; Kepler’s laws of planetary motion; energy of planetary and satellite motion; simple harmonic motion; oscillating mass on a spring; energy of an oscillating system; simple, physical, and torsion pendulums; resonance.
Labs: "Energy in Simple Harmonic Motion," to analyze the energy in oscillating systems and test the law of conservation of energy; "Pendulums and Gravity," to measure the local gravitational field strength.

Unit 8: Review and preparation for the AP exam. (5 to 6 block period or about 2 to 2 1/2 weeks)

Textbooks
Title: Physics for Scientists and Engineers, Volume 1, Ch
Publisher: Brooks Cole
Published Date: 05 January, 2007
Author: Raymond A. Serway
Second Author: John W. Jewett