Blog #5

Blog Post #5

This past week, we started learning about energy transfer and how to illustrate that with energy bar diagrams and we also did quantitative energy problems.
This is an example of an energy bar diagram.

These worksheets helped us get a greater understanding of energy and how it is absorbed, released, and described.  The main ideas go together because they help us to better understand energy and how it can be used and what it does.  One very important idea is that energy can only be energy.  It can never be in a different form than energy, it can transferred between different systems, but energy itself never changes.  This may be confusing because we use temperature to describe the thermal energy something has absorbed, but temperature and energy are not the same thing.
This is an example we used to describe energy flow from an ice cube to the inside of a freezer to the air around the refrigerator.

The activities that we did that went along with these ideas were just the worksheets and the reading that helped reinforce them.  We came to understand these ideas by doing the worksheets and participating in class discussions.  I don't feel that I have any questions about this week's ideas because I feel pretty confident about this stuff.  My participation in the learning process this week was very good because I find this stuff kind of interesting.  I would rate my understanding on all of these ideas at a 9.5 because I was not 100% sure on some of my answers for the quantitative energy worksheet.  I guess I still need to work on the quantitative energy problems a little more because I have some doubts on my work for those problems.  I have changed my thinking about energy and how it stays the same and never changes, and the only thing different about energy is how much energy is stored in a system.

Blog #4

Blog Post #4

During this past week, we finished learning about pressure and the variables related to it and then did a lab to introduce us to the second part of energy and matter.  So for two days, the main thing we focused on was the difference between heat and temperature.  We learned from the Eureka video that temperature is just the speed of particles, while heat is mass and speed of particles.  These ideas go together because they are related to each other, but they are not the same.  The difference is that temperature is a measurement while heat is something that you can add or remove and it will affect the temperature.  These were also the important ideas that went along with the relationship between temperature and heat.
This is the example that we used on Friday.

The lab that we did was Temperature vs. Heat, and what we did was we melted a ice cube and monitored its temperature.  We observed the water going through the three phases, from a solid to a liquid to a gas.
If we had continued to heat our water to only steam, this is what our graph would have looked like.

In order to understand these concepts, we answered the Question Of The Day, and the lab which included pre-lab questions and a conclusion.  One question I have about this stuff still is; How, if possible, do we measure heat?
My participation this week was very good because I was helping my group when they needed it and I played a part in the lab.  I would rate my understanding of these ideas at a 10 because I feel like I completely understand this topic.  I don't need to work on anything else because there wasn't much that we learned so there wasn't any confusion in the topics.  One new thing I learned was that there is a difference between heat and temperature, and what that difference is.  This has caused my ideas to change on how I perceive and use heat and temperature in a logical way.  So I feel that I will now have to think about how to apply and use heat, temperature, and the difference between the two concepts.