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.