Standing waves on a spring

You might have seen/done this one before, but the teachers I was showing it to found it quite useful, so I thought I would post it on talkphysics. The nodes and anti-nodes are a lot clearer when the amplitude of the oscialltions is higher, but I was told the signal generator broke the previous vibrator when set too high, so I was a bit cautious with this one.

There are several teaching and learning points with this demo. For example, you could get the students to calculate the speed of the wave along the spring, as we know the frequency from the signal generator and can measure the wavelength (for example by measuring the length of the stretched spring with a ruler).

Once we know the speed of the wave, we could ask the students to predict the next frequency in which a standing wave will form.

What else would you use this demonstration for? What other questions would/could you ask?