IB DP Physics lesson pack on contact and field forces for Topic A.2 Forces and momentum, SL and HL, first assessment 2025. It covers what a force is, the nine forces the course names, and Hooke’s law. Editable worksheet, 59-slide lesson deck, teacher key, worked solutions and a questions-only assessment, supplied as self-contained HTML plus colour and black-and-white PDF.
What students learn
- A force is a push or a pull of one body on another: one side of an interaction between them.
- Contact or field: do the two bodies have to touch? Students sort the nine forces the course names, each with its usual symbol.
- Weight, Fg = mg, points towards the centre of the body that makes the field. That direction is vertically down only near the Earth’s surface.
- The normal force is perpendicular to the surface, so it tilts on a ramp and is horizontal at a wall. Tension pulls along a string, at both ends.
- Hooke’s law, FH = -kx, applies to a stretched and to a compressed spring. Students read k from the gradient of a force-extension graph.
IB skills (Tool 3: Mathematics):
- Identify and use symbols stated in the guide and the data booklet (taught).
- Draw and label vectors: magnitude, point of application, direction (practised).
- Interpret gradients and intercepts (practised).
- Draw and interpret uncertainty bars (practised).
- Apply SI prefixes and units (practised).
What’s included:
- Student Worksheet - 21 pages
- Teacher Key - 31 pages
- Worked Solutions - 17 pages
- Assessment - 11 pages
- Lesson deck - 59 slides
The pack has 14 questions and 16 figures. Five are multiple choice. The other nine are written questions worth 61 marks. It closes on a 12-mark data question, built like a Paper 1B question. Its graph comes plotted, with error bars. Students add one reading. The gradient is 1/k, not k.
Students name and draw one force at a time. Free-body diagrams, resultants and Newton’s laws come later in the topic. Nothing here adds forces together. SI units, IB notation and IB command terms throughout. Use it with grades 11-12 (ages 16-19) as a lesson, cover lesson, homework or revision.
Part of the A.2 Forces and Momentum Complete Unit Bundle, 30% off buying the packs separately.
Related resources:
- Free-Body Diagrams and Force Pairs, the lesson that comes next
- Resultant Force, Inertia and Newton’s First Law, where those forces are added into a resultant
- Newton’s Second Law: F = ma, where those forces become an acceleration
- Friction: Static and Dynamic, where one of those contact forces gets its two laws
Updated 3 Nov 2026: please reprint.
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