A More Efficient Approach to Demonstrate Hooke’s Law

Abstract

Hooke’s law for springs, stating that the force needed to extend or compress a spring by some distance is proportional to that distance, is a topic covered by almost all introductory physics courses at both school and university levels. In this article we present a much more efficient and intuitive approach, compared to the traditional method, for demonstrating Hooke’s law. Figure 1 illustrates the design of our homemade setup. The apparatus consists of a base wooden frame, a hanging bar with a few equally spaced grooves (here we have six) at the top of the wooden frame, a transparent acrylic plate that is embedded into the wooden frame, two magnetic strips, and a thin, straight iron stick.