Learning Objectives

• How to light a match!
• How to light a fire
• How to measure temperature in Celsius
• The Heat Equation and terms
• The concepts of Heat, Energy and Temperature.

Wednesdaywas just taking role and welcoming students to the new school year.

Thursday and Friday: To kick off our unit on Thermodynamics, we set up simple ‘furnaces’ (called Thermal Containment Systems) so that we could light Dorito’s on fire and then heat a small can of water. By measuring the amount of water in mL and recording the starting and ending temperatures, we can calculate how many joules the system captured. Along the way we learned that Graduated Cylinders are used to measure volume in mili-Liters and that water has a density of 1 gram per mL. We learned about ‘delta T’ as the change in temperature, and the value that matters in the heat equation. And for many students, we learned simply how to light a match.

Learning Objectives

• The Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum: What caused it, what the impact on Earth was and why it is relevant today.
• The history and usage of the joule vs the calorie vs the KiloCalorie (known as food calories)
• Energy defined (the ability to do work)
• work defined (applying a force over a distance)
• that Heat is one form of energy and is measured (in science and engineering) in joules..
• That Temperature will increase if Heat is added and decrease if Heat is removed.

Monday-Wednesday: Clark first wrote on the white board, the heat equation and described the meaning of each of the terms. Heat (Q) is Energy measured in Joules! We then discussed how Heat is often confused with Temperature.. but the goal of this lab (the burning chips lab) is to learn to understand that by adding (heat) energy into a system, it will Change Temperature. (delta T). We then spent some time considering Earth’s changing climate including the history of the Ice Ages (we are still in them!) and how Earth’s temperature naturally ‘flips’ from warm periods to cold periods due to Volcanic Eruptions (which heat it up!) and the much longer, natural cooling cycles (Earth’s oceans pull CO2 out of the atmosphere to form Limestone). Of special interest however, is the Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum, which was a catastrophic heat of the Earth 55 million years ago. This led to a mass die off of Marine life globally and forced land animals to shrink. Along the way, students had time to consider their Poster Project (the deliverable of the Burning Chips lab) after Clark passed out the descriptor. 

Thursday and Friday: We continued our discussion of global heating and discussed El Nino as an ocean dynamic that redistributes heat around the planet. We also stepped into the topic of Kinetic Energy and how we calculate it. This calculation though also required that we take a moment to discuss Velocity (distance/time) and how we can measure it directly. In this lab, since students would be throwing tennis balls into the air, we first discussed Conic Sections and considered Parabolas.. which are the natural trajectory that thrown objects follow. In our case, since the Arc-length for a parabola requires calculus, we approximated the arc-length as semi circles.. (we can then use the equation for circumference to solve for the semi-circle.