Teaching seminar: Ball bounce episode

In Teaching Seminar on Tuesday night we had three items on the agenda:

1. Quickly share specific student ideas they had seen in their teaching and recorded in their little notebooks (during "dinner," ending at 6pm)
2. Collaboratively view what I'm calling the "Ball Bounce" episode, from Patti Banashak's class (6-7pm)
3. Work on the discourse tools we are helping them develop for use in their own classrooms (7-8pm)

Lane led the sharing from the little books and I liked the way it went very much. They had maybe three minutes to discuss at their table and then Lane called for one example from each table. Each person who spoke gave a specific, snappy contribution. Unfortunately I don't remember what anyone said! Does anyone else recall?

Also, I'm afraid that after leading the video part of the evening, I took a break while Lane led the discourse tools part. I'd be grateful if someone else could summarize that part of the class.

I led the video portion of the evening. I began by asking Patti to share what it was like to have us come and videotape her class. She was very much at ease and enthusiastic about it; she said it was almost completely hassle-free, that we just slipped in between classes and set stuff up without anyone hardly noticing, that there was no disturbance to her instruction. She said the consent forms were a bit of a bother but she understands why they're needed and that can't be helped. She encouraged everyone to invite us to visit. Isn't that nice?!

Then I had people propose norms for the discussion. I asked them to imagine that it was their classroom that was about to be shown, and think of how they would want people to talk about what they saw. People had good suggestions, along the lines of not critiquing the lesson, but rather just saying what we see the students doing. I added that we will really not have any basis for critiquing anyone's lesson, anyway, as we will only see a very short video episode.

In the episode we viewed, middle school students are attempting Energy Theater for a ball that bounces on the ground. Their scene begins just before the ball touches the ground and ends just as it leaves the ground. They have set out three loops of rope representing (from left to right, or foreground to background) the air, the ball, and the ground. They begin by deciding that they don’t need the air.

Here is a diagram Abby generated showing the layout of kids in the room:

The discussion of the video was great! People stuck to the norms very well and had interesting things to say. Here is the list of observations and questions that I generated from what they said. (I need to learn to write in narrower columns so that I can take a better photo.) After generating these questions, we watched the video again, with each table focusing on a single question (those are the numbers on the left). Some tables were able to answer their question definitively (3). Others determined that there was not evidence enough to answer their question (2, 6).

And, for future reference, here are the discussion questions that I prepared for myself in advance, then forgot to bring to the session. Some of them are similar to things that made it onto the board, i.e., the teachers noticed some of the same things I did. Nice! I do wish we had discussed the last one, but never mind.

• Make a visual representation of some kind showing the energy transfers and transformations that the students act out. (Draw a box for the ball and a box for the ground, and show what forms of energy they show as being where, throughout the process that they model.)
• What is signified by the rapid transitions between E and K?
• What is the significance of the placement of particular students within the object-areas? For example, Madelyn says, “So we should stand in the middle?” and Greg says, “No, we stand here at the bottom.” What difference does it make?
• One student says she feels like she is getting a “dance lesson.” What parts of what the students are doing seem to you to be about learning to do certain things with your body, and what are about showing what’s going on with the physics?
• Greg says, “We have to do it at the same time. He turns into heat, and the energy gets transferred into the ground.” What does he mean by that?
• Greg says, “We’re the ones pushing off the ground, and you’re the ones stretching.” What are the “ones” – units of energy? Bits of the ball?

In my opinion, an important area for growth in their video-discussion skills is for them to link their observation more closely to what they actually saw. For example, Ingrid's observation was, "Their analysis is very detailed." When I asked her to elaborate, she did not have much more at hand than that statement. It turned out that she was referring to the fact that the students divided the ball into parts and had different energy dynamics in the different parts -- a terrific point, but it took some effort to get there. Another area for growth is reducing the number of bland compliments. Laura in particular tended to say things like, "Seems like they're doing really great." Though this seems innocuous and pleasant, it actually gets under my skin, because it makes it seem like the point is to say whether the students are good or bad.

At the end of this part of the session I asked Patti how it felt to have her classroom observed in this way. She said it was fun and interesting and that everyone should do it! In particular, I remember her saying that when she watched the video, it was like seeing the scene for the first time, even though she had been there. Her memory of the events was blurrier than she had realized. People's observations were very interesting for her to hear, and she enjoyed the chance to reflect more deeply on what had been happening.

EP Meeting - Heat and Light Comparisons 11/16/2011

In the midst of paper writing, I was able to escape for a brief moment to look at two videos that are simply intriguing and rich. 
E2 Conversation about Thermal Energy 
In the EP Meeting, we first looked at a video of E2, where Leslie and crew are attempting to describe where the thermal energy fits into the lowering and lifting a ball scenario.  
The video is this: E2 110816 1253 R.Leslie.Light.Thermal.Subtitles.  


Leslie says that "sometimes thermal appears without forces" and I wanted to understand where she was coming from in terms of conduction.  We talked about how conduction does have forces, but at a microscopic level.  When we look at a free body diagram, the forces associated with it are those that affect the "macroscopic motion" of the object.  Thermal energy is a macroscopic description of the energy, however it doesn't quite work with the idea of associating a force with its energy transfer.  When we implement the free body diagram, we are limiting our story to macroscopic ideas.   Within E2, the selected scenarios allowed the teachers to postpone thermal energy in general, in hope of getting to it after they had established a working relationship between the energy and forces macroscopically - but they never got to thermal energy.


Lane said that the modeling training over the summer also postponed involving thermal energy.  I found this interesting because in my classroom, I also never got to a point where I was talking about thermal energy in depth.  This seems to be the last step that is often neglected, perhaps because it is most complicated?  I think this neglect/postponement/ignoring of thermal energy is because of several factors, and all of these factors may lead to a lack of general understanding of heat, thermal processes, and entropy.
    1. Time - teachers do not have the "time" to go into depth about any subject, so thermal energy is left on the back burner. 
    2. It is a macroscopic description of a microscopic phenomena.  This makes it difficult to simplify and describe quickly and easily. 
    3. Perhaps because we have a lack of force associated with thermal energy, it becomes more difficult to understand. 
    4.  Words and their definitions associated with thermal energy are often confused with each other - for example: 

• heat, 
• light, 
• hotness, 
• infrared, 
• energy, 
• entropy, 
• warmth,  
• and thermal.

These words are often confused, even among physicists!  An agreed upon definition of some of these words has yet to emerge from physics, let alone all of science (in particular I am thinking of heat, entropy and energy). The abstract nature of these words, the fact that we cannot "see" some of these phenomena makes understanding difficult, especially in the case of heat, warmth, and entropy. 
Leslie talks about being "near a nice, hot light" and this combination of hot and light could be confusing.  Is she talking about the radiation or the conduction from the light bulb to the air?  Is she talking about the infrared or visible light that is being emitted?  


Right after this, they begin to list off other ways in which thermal energy is present: 
Leslie: So sometimes forces do seem to increase thermal, and sometimes other things increase thermal.  Thermal has a weird story it seems. 
Jim: It can come from chemical, it can come from two sliding objects.
Leslie: It can come from electrical, like a spark, yeah. 


But these are all different situations, with different thermal transfers.  It is quite complicated!  Is it appropriate to talk about all of these situations as being related/similar/the same/connected?  


Heat and Light in E1 ET of a Light Bulb
We jumped then to another video of a group from E1 who was doing ET, trying to figure out how to represent a light bulb correctly.  It features Tim and Tomme predominantly.  
The episode is saved as: E1 110817 0912 Heat&Light
Here, we talked about photons, the electromagnetic spectrum, and how this is all related to a light bulb.  We determined that Tomme is probably confusing infrared light with heat energy, a concept that I was unsure of until recently.  Tomme says, "light is a higher energy state than heat."  Later she says that thermal energy is lower energy, with a longer wavelength.   She also asks, "isn't heat our dead end?"  I have a lot more to do with this episode.  I find it fascinating, mostly because I think her ideas are correct, but her vocabulary is confused.  She knows what she is talking about, but she is not using the correct words for her descriptions. 


Some questions that came out of this discussion included: 
    1.     Is visible light able to transfer to infrared? (I believe the answer is yes, with the object absorbing the visible light, then re-emitting the energy in the form of infrared light with more photons.)
    2.     Do we think of entropy as stuff?  What sorts of analogies are out there for entropy?  
                   - We mentioned Bellatrix's Vault as a possible analogy, as well as love, happiness, the Golden Grinder, and Hydra (cutting the head off to produce many more heads...). 
    3.     Does the Hope Diamond glow when you cuddle with it?  (I believe the answer is no - but it does glow red if you shine higher energy light on it!!)  :) 


Thanks all for the great discussion!!

What is science?

I am thinking about the nature of science on at least two levels. For one thing, we are trying to learn what the teachers in our program think is scientific, because one of our goals is to have them recognize science to be what we think of it as being. For another, I am thinking about the kind of research that I do these days and trying to identify what makes it scientific (and when it falls short). 

Here are a couple things that are not necessarily defining characteristics of science for me:

1. The scientific method. Though hypothesis testing and control of variables is great stuff, it can't be the whole story. At a minimum, there has to be some prior activity by which you obtained the hypothesis.

2. Laws of nature, by which I mean F=ma, energy conservation, and other such things. At a minimum, there has to be a process by which such laws are developed, and that would mean being scientific even before you knew anything about any laws.

I think that either of these things might be sufficient for identifying something as scientific, depending on your values, but to me neither of them is necessary - there is science that has neither of these properties. Hunter introduced me to Robert Hooke's drawing of a flea:

I mean, look at that thing. Click to make the picture bigger -- it's incredible. I had no idea a flea looked like that. Though there is no hypothesis here, no claim, and no laws of nature, to produce such a drawing feels like high science to me. So, here is something I count as science: The systematic observation and documentation of the details of phenomena.

This can't mean just looking at things. The explorers who went down into the deep ocean in a bathysphere, Barton and Beebe, likely saw all kinds of astonishing things, but didn't bring back much that oceanographers felt they could use, partly because they were unable to document what they saw and partly because they didn't know all that much about fish. Their seeing was limited by their lack of professional vision (the distinctive ways in which professionals notice and interpret phenomena of their profession). So, whatever it is that makes observation scientific has to do with having a "trained eye." And the observations that are made have to answer to the standards of the discipline.

Another thing that I want to count as science is going to be something about model-building -- the construction of explanatory accounts of phenomena. I haven't thought as much about that today.

For Emily: Chemical Energy

I'm tagging things that seem relevant to Emily Moore, a postdoc at CU Boulder whose background is in chemistry, as I process data for myself. I was looking for a particular episode and came across this gem from 2011 UE1 (entitled UE1 110630 1030 heather):

Not only is this full of fantastic stuff about chemical energy, Heather (?) says at the end that she is coming to believe that there's not different types of energy but that energy is a pure substance (that undergoes transformation). The teachers seem to think this is deep...and cool. What's really cool about this to me is that this is the kind of stuff that seems to be under debate (at the meta level) in the scientific community.

Teaching Seminar Reflection on Journals

Last night was our third teaching seminar. Attendance was dismal. At 5:30 there was only one teacher. At 6:00 we had six teachers. As Abby pointed out, it’s a pretty ridiculous use of resources to have four of us (Lane, Abby, me, Amy) there for six teachers. It seems like we need to rethink the structure with the informal discussion over dinner first because it just encourages people to show up late.

Zhomes Debrief:

We started with a debrief of the tour of Zhomes, guided by the question “What did you learn that you could use in your classroom?” There was an interesting range of responses about possible student activities, ranging from asking students to follow the energy in very specific aspects of the house (e.g. the super-insulated walls or the geothermal heat pump) to asking students to design a house (or a high school) that balances many complex and competing factors (energy savings, cost, water use, esthetics, community, etc.). A lot of the discussion focused on teachers’ own ideas about weighing complex factors in design. I was impressed to hear that after the tour Jeff had gone home and looked up the statistics behind some of their claims. He found several sources that gave values for the “average” energy use of a home, which had a lot of variation, but all were much lower than the value of 22K kWh to which our tour guide had favorably compared the Zhome energy use.

Reflecting on Journals:

Then Lane led the group in sharing their reflections from their journals. The exercise Abby had given them in the first teaching seminar was to jot down in their journal things they had learned about student thinking. Tonight they were supposed to share one thing they had learned. When we planned the first teaching seminar, we knew that this exercise would be difficult for them and that they would probably misinterpret it. We knew that really hearing student ideas is difficult, that this is our goal for what we hope they will be able to do at the end of teaching seminar, and that we don’t really expect them to get it the first time. So why were we so surprised and unprepared when it went exactly as we expected?

Perhaps because it started off so fantastic that we weren’t expecting the sudden dive off the cliff…

Lisa went first with a discussion of an activity in which she asked students to try to define forces. She noticed that they were initially defining forces as energy. I will need to go back to the video to remember exactly what she said, but I was really impressed with her respectful curiosity about her students’ thinking. She never said or implied that anything about this student idea as wrong or bad, but got really curious about where it was coming from and how they could use it productively when they got around to discussing energy. I was particularly impressed to hear this from Lisa given her previous history. She took E1 in 2009, E2 in 2010, and has been to nearly every teaching seminar we’ve ever had. During the first year of teaching seminar, she was part of a group of Bellevue teachers that I loathed listening to, because all they ever did was bitch about how dumb their students were and all the things they didn’t get. I don’t know how much Lisa herself participated in those discussions, because I tried to avoid listening to them and she didn’t stand out to me. But if she had been engaging with student ideas in 2009 the way she was last night, I think she would have stood out to me. So I suspect that what I observed last night was some pretty amazing progress.

Then Lane shared a student idea of how a cfl bulb works, which launched the teachers into all sorts of tangents about light bulbs, electricity, and energy conservation, but not about student ideas. This went on for way too long before we cut it off.

Then Laura shared about giving her students a pretest and posttest on electric circuits and being shocked by how poorly they did on the posttest, even though she had just given them a totally clear lesson and it seemed like they were getting it. (She also brought in copies of her students’ pretests and posttests for Keeley probes). Her discussion was totally focused on how they didn’t get it, and not really on what the students were actually thinking, but I felt like this was a fantastic starting point. Recognizing that your students aren’t learning what you think they’re learning is a critical first step to really hearing what they are thinking. This feels to me like something we can work with. (Never mind that we didn’t.) Laura took UE1 in 2009, and hasn’t been back to any Energy Project classes until Teaching Seminar this year, so it seemed like a nice confirmation that maybe we’re having some effect that she wasn’t as far along in her thinking as Lisa.

Then Jeff talked about a lesson on energy transfers and transformations, and he talked for quite a while, but I didn’t hear anything at all about student thinking, even wrong student thinking, just stuff about his lesson. I asked him what specific student ideas he learned, and he continued to talk about his lesson. Neither Abby nor Lane remember me asking him about student ideas, so maybe I wasn’t clear. I definitely wasn’t forceful enough, because I didn’t ask a second time or point out that he still wasn’t talking about student ideas.

Then Ingrid talked about an activity she did where her students looked at energy used in different sports. Like Jeff, she focused on the lesson and not on student ideas. I also asked her to tell us a specific student idea. She said one group had a hypothesis about the energy of running on Astroturf vs. cement, but then did an experiment to test it and discovered that their hypothesis was wrong. I think there was something like a student idea in here, the thing the students initially thought, but her focus was on how they tested it, not on what the students were thinking. I think we could have worked with this productively to tease out the student idea, but we didn’t.

Then Jean told a really inspiring story about a student she was working with who had been really difficult and rebellious and was suddenly turning around and getting really excited about science. This story wasn’t really about student ideas either, but it was so inspiring that nobody really had the heart to interrupt her.

Then Kim told a story about a lesson about burning almonds, which I think she hasn’t even actually given to her students yet because she’s still trying to figure out the chemistry of it herself. There was nothing about student ideas, but I didn’t have the heart to ask because everyone seemed anxious to move on.

By the time everyone was done sharing we only had a half hour left for a lot of other stuff we had planned. The instructors had a little pow-wow while the teachers were reading the big ideas article for the next section, and we decided Lane would give a little speech at the end explaining again what it means to write down a student idea.

Big Ideas:

The last section was looking at the Thompson article about big ideas and trying to figure out how to form groups to look at big ideas over the rest of the year. There was a lot of confusion about how to form groups. It’s going to be a difficult task because there is so much diversity about levels, topics, and how frequently people show up. Lane is going to set up google doc to help people figure it out.

Wrap-up:

We ended with Lane’s little speech in which he emphasized that what we want teachers to do is to “Focus on a single student idea that surprised you.” Kim asked, “Regardless of whether it’s right or wrong?” and we said yes, whether it’s right or wrong is not the point at all. This seemed like a good question, that indicated that she might be understanding the assignment. Lisa asked, “Is it OK if it's not surprising?” pointing out that she’s been teaching for a long time so she’s not surprised by much anymore. We said that’s OK.

"Press release"

As we come into the last year-ish of the Energy Project, we are trying to get a sense of our accomplishments, especially since what we have done in the past few years is not at all what was planned. Our hired evaluators are pushing us on this partly because their job is to evaluate us relative to our own goals for ourselves. They routinely ask their clients to do what they call a "history of the future" exercise, for which the task is:  Imagine the project is over. Write a press release describing what it accomplished. 

To help us with this reflection we solicited thoughts from some savvy collaborators who we thought would give us helpful perspective on our project, and had a big ol' brainstorming meeting in which we filled the board with things that we either (1) feel we have accomplished (even if not necessarily documented) or (2) expect ourselves to have accomplished by the end of the project. That night I was inspired to write the press release. I had a little fun with it. Suggestions welcome.

=============================

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Multimillion Dollar Project Championed the Teaching and Learning of Energy in Physics

The Energy Project, the five-year, $3.7-million project that put physics education research and professional development at SPU on the map, has concluded. Among the prime contributions of the Energy Project was to improve the energy content knowledge of everyone involved – from teachers to faculty researchers. Some of this development leveraged the energy-as-a-substance metaphor into powerful new representations of energy, including Energy Theater, Energy Blocks, and Energy Diagrams. Armed with these organizing representational tools, learners tackled more complex energy scenarios than are normally attempted in physics courses. No roller-coasters for this crowd: instead learners took on refrigerators, cold packs, the Gaussian Gun, and electric circuits, among others. These rich tasks have given the Project unprecedented opportunity to identify K-12 teachers’ ideas about energy, including valid alternative ontologies for energy (e.g., as a fuel or a stimulus). Teacher interests drove researchers to take seriously topics not normally addressed in introductory physics, including the idea that what matters about energy is not only its conservation (as physicists normally emphasize) but also its usefulness, and how the quality of energy may deteriorate as a result of certain processes. This line of research led to a model for teaching about entropy, a concept that has been misused to bolster nonscientific arguments about evolution. Teacher interests also pushed faculty researchers into new intellectual territory in articulating the meaning and value of forms of energy, and in disambiguating energy concepts from force concepts ­­– then subsequently weaving together these two causal factors in an integrated mechanistic account of physical processes. This energy content development not only served K-12 teaching interests, but also advanced the field of physics.

The Project’s groundbreaking research about the teaching and learning of energy took place primarily in the context of innovative professional development courses. Unlike courses that simplistically tell teachers what to do, these courses were taught responsively; instructors attended to the disciplinary substance of teachers’ thinking, took intellectual concerns seriously, and used the observations they made to guide the course content. “The participants (and their interests) are driving the questions that the class explores, within limits,” said visiting faculty researcher MacKenzie Stetzer. “They are really taking ownership of the experience in a way that leads to a more explicit partnership between the instructor and the participants.” Collaborator Siri Mehus, faculty researcher specializing in interaction analysis, said, “In its design, the course seemed to find an ideal balance between openness (participants chart their own course of exploring and understanding energy concepts) and structure (exercises and activities are well-organized, logically sequenced, and clear in their purpose). As the parent of a school-age child, it makes me very happy to know that the people who are teaching our children (at least a few of them) are thinking about students’ learning in the way that this course promotes.” Goals of the summer institute included not only energy content but also the development of teacher agency in science, enhancement of teacher understanding of the nature of science as a flexible and constructed body of knowledge, and teacher recognition that they themselves could contribute to that body of knowledge. Goals of the academic-year professional development program included fostering teacher attention to the disciplinary substance of student thinking in a “video club” model, in which teachers collaboratively analyzed video of one another’s classrooms. In a capstone effort, the Project in its last year developed the means to support teachers in putting their professional development experiences to use in their own classrooms, the ultimate goal of any professional development effort.

In addition to the pragmatic effort to improve the teaching and learning of energy, the Project made extraordinary contributions to the development of cognitive theory, well beyond what had been originally envisioned. In making use of the energy-as-a-substance metaphor the Project aligned itself with cognitive linguistics, in which metaphor is a primary organizer of thinking and a significant factor in conceptual change. In using the body as a symbolic system for learning abstract concepts (in Energy Theater), the Project found itself contributing to the most current theories of embodied cognition. These contributions took the Project beyond the teaching and learning of energy specifically into the territory of how thinking and learning take place in general, and extended the reach of the resulting research into the learning sciences.

Had these efforts been merely local, they would still have been tremendously admirable. Fortunately, during the Energy Project years, the team at SPU launched itself into the national community of physics education researchers, sharing findings and recruiting collaborators at an unprecedented scale. Dozens of talks and multiple papers, both short and long, contributed to the PER community’s recognition of the extraordinary potential of energy as a research topic. The Energy Project Summer Research Institute (EPSRI), founded to help the Energy Project create and manage its hundreds of hours of video documentation, provided a diverse community of researchers with an arena for inter-theoretical research on a common data set and made SPU a hub for scholarly community, mentorship, and leadership development. “The EPSRI is a huge community-building exercise that provides the whole PER community with deeper connections and new skills. It aligns a community around common tools and questions,” offered Michael Wittmann, lead faculty in the Maine Physical Sciences Project. By the end of the Project, SPU team members had established a new Physics Education Research Group at SPU, grounded in the Department of Physics and the School of Education. With two new full-time research faculty, three new graduate students, and multiple faculty collaborators in addition to the permanent faculty at SPU, the team is eagerly anticipating its next multi-million-dollar research program.

Teaching Seminar visit to zhomes

Last night for Teaching Seminar Lane arranged for us to have a tour of zhomes, a new zero-energy development of town homes in Issaquah. I videotaped, but I'm not sure if there's really anything worth seeing on the video.

We had a good crowd, about 15 teachers, some of whom I hadn't seen for a while, and everyone seemed very enthusiastic about the tour. The tour was led by a woman named Elly, who is the education and outreach coordinator, and a man named Brad who is the project manager. Both of them were extremely knowledgeable about the project and were able to answer every question we asked except for the question about whether any of them had sold yet. Our fears that the tour would just be a sales pitch by a real estate agent were totally unfounded.

Having recently been through a green house remodel (from hell) myself and learned all the ins and outs of what's really green and what's greenwashing, I can say that they pulled out all the stops on this one, and really made it green in every way: reducing energy (and water) consumption, producing renewable energy (and water), reducing waste, using sustainably produced materials, and using non-toxic materials. They have super-insulated walls and a geothermal heat pump, which keeps the energy needed for heating the house and water low. They produce all the energy they need with pv solar panels. They *don't* have two things people commonly think of as being "green" features, solar hot water panels and an on-demand hot water heater, because they don't really need them with the geo-thermal heat pump. Also, there's no gas in the house, and one thing I learned in my own house remodel is that an on-demand water heater uses so much energy at once (although not much averaged over time), that it puts a huge load on your electrical system, so it's usually not worth it if you have to power it with electricity. They also harvest rainwater for flushing toilets and washing clothes. And they do lots of other cool things that I won't go into.

A couple new things I learned last night:

1. The term "watergy" means the combined water and energy used, taking into account the energy that went into producing your water and the water that went into producing your energy. I'm not sure if this is a quantitative concept, as in there's a formula to actually calculate a number for your watergy, or a qualitative concept, as in, wow, a lot of energy is used to get water to your house and a lot of water is used to make energy.

2. The price of pv solar panels has recently dropped dramatically due to flooding of the market from China, and Washington state is offering so many incentives (we pay 6 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity, but Washington state will pay you up to 55 cents per kilowatt-hour to produce electricity), that the payback time for solar panels in Washington is now estimated to be only 7-9 years. Wow.

The two things I was not impressed with about zhomes were the design and liveability of the homes, and the price. The lighting was terrible, and that combined with super dark finishes made them really depressing to be inside. And the most of them, even a 1500-square-foot "two bedroom" had no private rooms at all, just giant rooms and lofts that are all interconnected. I like less privacy than most people I know, but even I couldn't live in a house like that. Even if I could afford it, which I definitely couldn't!

So what did this tour add up to for the Energy Project? What did we or the teachers learn that we could use in our teaching? I think using a zero energy house design could be a great starting point for a unit on energy. Students be given the task of designing a house, and then make arguments for the trade-offs of various choices. After grappling with the problem for themselves, they could be presented with the real choices made in various design projects, including zhomes (I have lots of contacts for people who could provide other case studies, and could even offer my own house to study), and asked to evaluate those choices. Bringing in things besides energy, like water, cost, and liveability, makes all those decisions even more complex. I think a project like this could really help students learn about energy conservation in both senses of the phrase (and compare the two senses) and learn some great critical thinking skills. But if neither we nor the teachers are going to take on this project, I'm not exactly sure how this tour fits into what we're doing.

It might be interesting to ask the teachers who went to reflect on how they could use what they learned in their teaching of energy.

Islands of identification

Abby and I are reading P. W. Bridgman's The Nature of Thermodynamics, with the goal of understanding entropy, degradation, usefulness, etc. in disciplinary terms.  We picked this book because it is a pleasant little paperback, with next to no equations, written in a chatty, accessible style, and because Stamatis said it was good.

Bridgman won the Nobel prize in physics in 1946 for investigations of the properties of matter under high pressure.  He also is credited with coining the term "operational definition"; so I feel in his debt.  This book, published in 1941, starts out with an extended explanation of why his book is not going to be a rigorously logical or mathematical treatise.  The explanation is in terms of personal taste:

[A precise logical] analysis serves certain definite purposes; in particular one may feel a security in the conclusions of such an analysis which is impossible in a less formal structure.  But this I suspect is not the whole reason why those whose analysis runs to this form actually do it; it must be that they enjoy such rigorously precise activities for their own sake.  Personally, my tastes place me in that other group which does not take an intrinsic pleasure in the elaboration of a logically flawless and complete structure.  I would undergo the labor of constructing such a structure only as it might be necessary for some more compelling purpose. (p. vii)

His experience is that what feels to him most like "understanding" is found when physics concepts are expressed verbally, as opposed to in the language of logic or mathematics.  He goes on to suggest that this is not merely his own preference, but is likely something significant about human cognition:  he suggests that if we were to study which concepts and operations have survived in physics, out of all the possible conceivable concepts,

...I am convinced that the verbal factor wold be found to be one of the most important factors determining selection and survival.  The concepts of physics which we inherited ready-made were such that they fit the same verbal pattern as the more familiar objects of daily life; we demand of any new concepts which we are forced to invent to meet new previously unknown situations that they permit the familiar verbal handling. ...For our verbal habits have evolved from millions of years of searching for adequate methods of dealing verbally with external situations, eliminating methods that were not a close enough fit. (p. x-xi)

I have the idea that Bridgman would be pleased by embodied cognition.  I also think he would be a fan of Ochs, based on something he said about the development of atomic theory (long before it had any justification in experiment):

It just seems to be a fact about our thinking machinery that we must have our atoms; we cannot think of the velocity of a uniform fluid without imaging the "particles" of which the fluid is composed... Perhaps the human necessity for its particles is connected with the necessity for "identification" in thinking; the very words we use are little islands of identification in the amorphous sea of our cerebration, and the particle of a fluid is a little materialized piece of identifiability.  (p. 9-10)

I am never going to get to the second law at this rate; but I'm really enjoying myself.

Motorcycle current

I'm going back and watching video we've collected from teachers' classrooms for evidence of PCK and attending to the disciplinary substance of student ideas. Thought this video was awfully cute:

This comes from a class that has been using an adapted version of the Physics by Inquiry electric circuits model. The groups are in the process of devising rules for what happens to the current through the battery when a bulb is added in series and (separately) when a bulb is added in parallel.

Not sure what all of the sound effects that Frank is using mean, but I think the circuit that he's 'tracing' with his 'motorcycle sounds' is a parallel one. I think the crash at the end might be when the 'current' returns to the battery.

Light bulb energetics according to Brian Frank

The thing that makes Brian's model greatly superior to mine is that his has a mechanism for current flowing.  

Teaching seminar: Goals for the year

The beginning of the academic year means the beginning of a new year of Teaching Seminars, which is a tough subject for me.  There have been good times and bad times, in my opinion, but overall I would not call our Teaching Seminar a big success.  Attendance is low, participation is ordinary, the video of the teachers' discussions is mostly not rich, and there's not a sense on our part (the leadership) that we have really helped people get anywhere.  I hope I'm not being too negative in my characterization of our group opinion.... this is how it feels to me.

We are trying something different this year.  The plan is to support teachers in creating more high-quality discourse in their classrooms using an established discourse tool.  We have chosen a family of tools used by a team in the School of Ed at UW, called Tools for Ambitious Science Teaching; the developers are local and will hopefully collaborate with us.  Our hope is that once teachers get invested in producing exciting discourse using this tool, they will be excited to see how it works in their own classroom, and will eagerly invite us to videotape.  (Or, at least, they will feel less vulnerable about our videotaping, because we will be videotaping their enactment of someone else's thing, rather than just them.)  And the resulting video will be better than what we've usually gotten in the past, which will both support the Teaching Seminar itself, and will serve as evidence that we're helping teachers improve their classroom practice.  This is our vision.  

For the first session, though, we wanted to make sure and hear from the teachers about their own goals for themselves, and how we might support them during the academic year.  About a dozen people showed up and there was a convivial feeling.  As teachers came in, we had these beautiful little books waiting for them (thank you, Julie!):

Abby explained that their task, with these little books, is to jot down interesting things that students say, or that they see happen in their classes.  If you can write one little thing a day, or even not every day but just some days, then by the time the next Teaching Seminar comes around, there will be quite a bit of material.  The books are wonderfully attractive; they have a soft vinyl cover, they come in these beautiful colors, and they fit in a shirt pocket or back pants pocket.  I took one and put it in the camera bag.  

After a pleasant dinner, the first task was to respond to the following prompt (I'm paraphrasing):

"It is the summer of 2012!  As you relax and hike through the Cascades, you reflect on one wonderful new thing that happened this year.  What is it?"

I sat with Jean, Laura, Linda, Jim, Lane, and Stamatis, with a visitor named Ragini sitting in with us for a bit.  We had a wonderful conversation in which I learned a lot about each person's particular circumstances, and their wishes for their classrooms, which in some cases were in rather heartbreaking contrast.  There was a lot of consensus on the kind of statements people imagined making on this envisioned future hike:  here is what we agreed on:

(Click to make it bigger if it's hard to read.)  The rest of our conversation was centered on two other prompts, and since we were invited to share individual answers to the questions, that's what wound up on the white boards:

"What content area would you like to focus on this fall?"

"What content area would you like to see growth in for your students this fall?
"What instructional practice would you like to focus on developing this fall?"

The handwriting is all mine.  I wrote what people were saying partly because we had been asked to (and no one else picked up the pen before I did), partly to keep our discussion focused, and partly to acknowledge the very cool things that people were saying.

Here is the white board from the other table, which has responses to all three of the above prompts.  I hear that their discussion included a lot about Socractic seminars (described here).

Clement on embodied examples that don't work

For my other project, I'm reading Clement's paper on "anchoring conceptions" and "bridging analogies":

J. Clement, D.E. Brown, and A. Zietsman, “Not all preconceptions are misconceptions: finding ‘anchoring conceptions’ for grounding instruction on students’ intuitions,” International Journal of Science Education 11, no. 5 (1989): 554–565.

In this paper, they look for "anchoring examples," which are physical scenarios for which at least 70% of students give a correct explanation with high confidence before instruction. The idea is that these scenarios have the potential to be used in instruction to help students transfer their correct intuition to more difficult examples.

I was particularly struck by his discussion of physical scenarios that he expected to be intuitive students because they can easily put themselves into the scenario, but that turned out not to be so intuitive:

There were also some cases for which we mistakenly expected certain anchors to be stronger than others. For example, given the situation of a hand pushing down on a spring in question 4, students were asked whether the spring exerts a force on the hand. This was considered to be a good candidate for an anchor, but we had some reservations about how strong an anchoring example it would be. We expected that the upward force would be recognized more intuitively in the case of holding up a 30 pound dictionary on an outstretched hand (question 2). In both cases the subject can imagine feeling the upward force, but the dictionary situation involves a person exerting the force and allows for direct use of kinesthetic intuition. However, the results indicated that the hand-on-spring situation was in fact an anchoring example for more students (belief score of 80%) than the dictionary-on-hand situation (belief score of 65%). One possible reason for the spring being a stronger anchor is that the spring moves up when the hand is removed, whereas this is not so obvious for the hand when the book is removed.

Perhaps the most surprising result from this study was the low belief score for the log exerting a force on Mr T’s chest in question 1. We predicted this situation would be a solid anchor for students because of the opportunity to identify with the person in the problem. However, this situation was an anchor for only 53% of the students. A full 30% answered, although some with low confidence, that the log would not exert a force. We are interested in using deeper probes and analysis techniques to determine the origins of these anomalous responses in the future.

His description of what he expected seems very much in line with the way we describe how embodied learning activities build on the theory of Ochs. He does not offer any speculation about why these anchors didn't work as well as he expected. Surely this has some kind of implications for our work...

Light bulb energetics

In watching those light bulb energy theater episodes, I realized I needed to do some thinking about energy transfers and transformations in a light bulb that is burning steadily.  Here's what I feel clear on:  Energy, which I will call electrical energy, enters the bulb.  Electrical energy is transformed into thermal and light energy in the filament.  Thermal and light energy leave the bulb.  Check.

How does the electrical energy enter the bulb?  By means of the current, right?  Energy is carried by objects, and electrons are the objects that are going into the bulb.  That's why I called it "electrical" energy in the first place.  But, here is the issue that Russell brings up in the first episode of my earlier post:  The electrons leave the bulb, too.  And the current is exactly the same when it goes out as when it came in.  How can a current lose energy (as it must, if thermal and light energy are going to be produced at the filament) and yet be the same afterwards?

Over lunch, Amy and I did our darndest to think of what could be different that we might not be thinking of.  Could the electrons have less kinetic energy after the filament, and perhaps be differently dispersed in the wire to make up for it?  We think the answer is no.  We think that anything we could measure about the charges in the wire would be the same before the filament as after it.

My physics brain, meanwhile, was reminding me that there is something different about the electrons before the filament than after it, which is that they are at a "higher voltage."  That's just dead knowledge when I say it that way, a vocabulary word rather than an explanation; but it got me thinking.  I thought about the electrons as blocks sliding downhill.  Or actually, sliding frictionlessly on a horizontal surface (the wire), then sliding down a carpeted hill (the filament) so that the speed on the hill is constant, then sliding horizontally again (the other wire), and then being lifted back to their starting point by an elevator (the battery).  The blocks are the same before and after the hill – anything I cared to measure about any one block is the same, and a movie of the set of blocks on the lower level looks the same as a movie of the set of blocks on the higher level.  Yet they "generated" thermal energy on the way, when they rubbed on the carpet.  So the upper blocks must have had some energy not associated with an observable property of each block itself.  The only thing that changed is the height.  On that basis, I hereby invent "height energy" in the context of electric circuits.  Except it's not height; it's position relative to the battery.  So let's call it "position energy," or "arrangement energy," or "configuration energy."

Position energy is tricky, because you can't see anything about the object itself, in isolation, that tells you that it has more energy.  You know that the object has more energy because it can make more of something happen - it can warm the carpet more, or light the filament more.  But you can't see that (ahem) potential directly.

I'm also ready to define a "field" now, and my definition is:  A set of different positions associated with different energies.

Light bulb energy theater

I needed more video of Energy Theater for the paper I'm writing, and also Michael Wittmann needed some for a class he's teaching that is discussing our work - his deadline helped me get on the stick.  Abby remembered what she thought would be a good one from E1 this summer, and she is so right!  It's full of great stuff.  Here are three episodes in which E1 teachers negotiate and then enact energy theater for an incandescent light bulb. The episodes take place back-to-back, so the below is in some sense a single 22-minute "episode," but the conversation naturally divided itself into three topics, so I broke it up.

In the first episode, they discuss whether the fact that the electrons go in a loop means that they, the energy, should also go in a loop.  Their discussion is initially about disambiguating matter and energy; eventually, the issue is refined to be about the fact that the electrons are carriers of electrical energy, some of which is transferred to the filament but some of which stays with the electrons.

In the second episode, they discuss whether the thermal energy and light energy are made simultaneously in the filament or whether light energy is made from thermal energy (or vice versa).  Lane makes what I think is a terrific move, which is that he tells them the answer straight out, but not in terms of the ET representation:  he says something like, "The filament glows because it is hot," leaving them to translate that into ET.  There is also a juicy bit in which Tomme states that it is "physically impossible" for thermal energy to transform into light energy, because "light is a higher energy state than heat."

In the third episode they act out the energy theater.  Something to note is that all their planning is represented in the above episodes -- they don't really "rehearse" their energy theater, or learn from the model that they enact, because they don't have time.  Christine takes the lead and they all follow her directing.

I look forward to discussing these in a future group meeting.

Classroom Observation of ET

My observation of Mrs. B's 7th/8th Gr. ET - 10/10/2011

So much to talk about!  I had such a blast going observing with Rachel.  I felt like the response we got from Mrs. B was super positive and I hope that I get to do more of these observations.

We observed two classes and the differences between the two classes were absolutely striking!  Each class that she has was a small number of students compared to her regular class because 1/2 the students were out for a field trip.  The first class - Period 4 - was 16 students 10 boys, 6 girls and the second class - 5th period - was only 9 students 4 boys, 5 girls.  These students were asked to do ET for a bouncing tennis ball, from the point it just starts touching the ground, to the point it just leaves the ground.  I thought this was uber hard for the students to start with, but maybe it was just me!

The main difference between the classrooms was the students willingness to participate.  I feel like the group I watched in 4th period was paranoid about saying anything.  They were simply listening to the one student Jacob make his statement, and then followed along without considering it to be correct.  The "discussion" only lasted a little while and then they all stood around awkwardly for some time.  Finally, because I am not a good observer yet, I asked them to do it again so that I could see what was going on....then Mrs. B came over and asked them some questions that got them started again.  They couldn't move on without her really.
The 5th period class however, because it was smaller, had the full attention of Mrs. B because there was only one ET group.  I thought this class did an amazing job of working together at the time - but now I realize that although there were only 9 students, three of them were really the ones that were doing most of the talking.  Three others were called out to talk by Mrs. B, and four of them basically didn't say anything.  Were the numbers so skewed for the teachers?  It might be interesting to compare the participation of the members of the groups of adults to students.

When I came out of this class, I was so pumped up about trying to figure out ways to help out our teachers who were in the EP Workshop and wanted to use ET in the classroom.  I felt like the bridge between what happens during the summer and the classroom during the year was really not there.  Although Mrs. B did a great job on the first go-around, I felt like even between the 4th and 5th classes, things improved that could have been scaffolded a bit better for her coming out of the workshop.  A few changes/additions that I thought were really valuable that could happen were:
   1. Parent volunteers - In this case, Mrs. B was brilliant to introduce ET with the prior knowledge that her classes were going to be smaller.  However, in most classes, this opportunity is NOT possible, so how do you deal with 30ish students all learning ET at once and in different groups?   Perhaps you ask parent volunteers or other teachers to help out for this one day/training period.  That kind of support would have helped tremendously and could be something that we helped support by allowing teachers in the Seattle area a chance to help each other and providing money for a sub.  But I don't know if this is possible! :)
   2. Emphasis on conversation - I feel that although the teachers had great models for the style of open-ended classrooms during the summer, perhaps this could have been pointed out more explicitly for the teachers so that they could apply it.  I felt like Mrs. B was trying to let the students do their own thinking but that she didn't know how to "train" them to steer the conversation themselves.  I know it was only middle school, but I still feel like listening and critically thinking about what others are saying could be something that students do!  For the second class, Mrs. B emphasized that she wanted to hear everyone's conversation and ideas and that the important piece was the talking and discussing that the did.   This helped I think for 5th period.
   3. Suggestions for ET newbies in their classrooms - Now that we have some teachers who have tried ET in their classrooms, I think it would be awesome to have some of those veteran teachers of ET coming in to talk to the E1 teachers during the summer workshop, or at least if we asked them what they would say to teachers (as kind of a list of advice for them when they try it).
   4.  Allow total screw ups and start with an easy example - I think that the whole point of ET that is so awesome is that the finished product doesn't have to be wonderful (the first time) and that is is okay if they are not absolutely accurate.  I feel like the teachers in the EP workshop did excellent ET and I hope that they don't expect that of their kids the first time.  That said, Mrs. B said that just dropping a ball was too easy an example for her students to start with and I wonder if that is really true.  She started with an example that I thought was really hard.  It was tough to bring in Elastic energy, kinetic, and heat (as she called it) from friction.  Her introduction example the second class was much better. (4th period she talked about a roller coaster, and 5th period she referred to the first part of the ball's journey as it fell the second time.)
I am sure I will add more ....there is so much more!

Cosmopolitan and Embodied Cognition

I forgot to post these pictures! So, very fittingly (because it was on the way home from EPSRI), at 4 am in a midwestern airport I decided to buy a glossy magazine to pass the time. There was no way I was going to be productive and actually read something useful, like the stack of papers I decided to lug with me. And what did I find inside? Embodied cognition!

Here's the infamous clipboard study (reinterpreted a bit):

And this one I'd never heard of. Interesting. Wonder how they measure creative thoughts.

And my mom always told me not to read trash!

EP Meeting 9/21/2011 - Useful Energy Episodes

This meeting discussed two episodes about teacher's perceptions of what it means to have useful energy.  It was pretty incredible to have all of these talented people show up to watch my episodes and share their responses. First, we looked at Jessica's Useful Energy video from E1, where she discusses Shrinking People to represent the usefulness of the energy.  I am going to write down a random assortment of people's reactions to this episode.
1. Rachel suggested Jessica's suggestion might be a secret form of being "less" energy and whether Jessica really understood it to mean not as much usefulness as opposed to not as much energy.  Lezlie/others thought that even if Jessica knew this - students might not.  Lezlie said that we have seen students interpret less energy with stature in the past already.  Here, Jessica was worried that the opposite might be true.
2. Stamatis was concerned with what "usefulness" actually means for the teachers (and for us).  We talked at length about what the ultimate reason was for the energy and perhaps that teachers might think that the order of energy use matters.  For example, if the energy appears in a certain form at the end of a process, that form might be the most useful...?  Teachers might think that the energy that doesn't "do" the thing you were setting out to do is not as useful - even if it is used in the process.
Other ideas mentioned were:
-  that's not why you were doing it - (so it must be less useful)
- the turbine moving in the coal burning example is more observable, - Lane

- things that are moving and electricity are viewed as useful - Sam

- anything that you have a use for is useful! -Rachel

3. Amy asked how much of this is an association of entropy? Lane said if you don't use thermal energy, it will disperse and "go away."  At this point we started making a list of:

What makes energy less useful?

a. Less useful by changing form - Jessica
b. less useful by spreading out
c. by using it
d. increase in energy ?
e. can't be stored
f. can't be controlled
g. becomes less available


Care should be taken not to make it sound like it is always a one way street - as in it always becomes less useful - unless we are intentionally planning to state that.

4. Both the way usefulness is talked about and Azzam's control comments bring up a human element of use.  We talked about quality vs. usefulness next.  Quality - not requiring humans - Usefulness - what is supposed to be done with it.  Sam and Stamatis brought up the idea that the teachers and ET need constraints.  Jessica thinks that you can't run the movie backwards - she needs/wants the constraint in place. Two constraints that are not there that Stamatis wants are: 1. Can't have Gs--> Ts and 2. How do we show the irreversibility of ET?


5. We watched the second episode - Derrick's talk of the quality of energy from E2, briefly before closing.  Line 40 was discussed (Derrick uses "liberate") - Lane says, 'Run free, little ball, run free!'
Line 38 Tim says the thermal is gone which is a dead end comment!
Line 51 Derrick says, "less that's available to you" and we ended with the big question,
"What is it that makes energy more or less useful?" 

Talk about a great question!  Thanks everyone for the rich discussion!

PRST-PER Paper on Substance Metaphor for Energy

Eric Brewe just published a PRST-PER paper on "Energy as a substancelike quantity that flows: Theoretical considerations and pedagogical consequences." I haven't read it yet, but it sounds like something that is particularly relevant to this project.

The Cabin in the Woods (part 2 of EPSRI Congress presentation)

The other part of my EPSRI Congress presentation was to present my thinking on an analogy that Hunter and Rachel came up with for instruction, and how it applies to different instructional knowledge.

Here's the analogy:

• Cabin in the woods = Content knowledge
• Path to cabin = Instructional method
• Wilderness skills = Scientific thinking skills
• Navigation skills = Problem-solving skills

Most physics instructors care about their students getting to the cabin (there may be supplies there that you need for the next leg of your journey). But most physics instructors also agree that just getting to the cabin is not enough; it matters how you get there and what you learn along the way. However, there are lots of different ideas about which method is best.

Here is my characterization of different teach methods' relationship to the cabin in the woods:

• Leslie’s Teaching Method (SGSI / Responsive Teaching) – Ask questions to get them started on path towards woods, let them find their own path, redirect them if they’re on a path that is clearly not going towards the cabin.
• Guided Inquiry – Guiding along a specific path
• Pure Discovery – Exploring the woods (who cares if you ever get to the cabin?)
  
• Direct Instruction – Helicopter air drop

Peter Shaffer said he found this explanation extremely helpful and comforting. He had been worried that we were just letting the teachers wander lost in the woods, and this helped him understand what we were doing and that it was not the thing he feared.

Energy Theater Force Diagrams and the Five Laws (from my EPSRI Congress Presentation)

The recent posts about energy theater diagrams have inspired me to finally post about my EPSRI congress presentation.

In E2 this year, they tried to answer the following challenge:

Give a causal or mechanistic description of energy transfers and transformations.
Why does energy transfer or transform? (Wealth analogy)
Must have something to do with forces…
What is relationship between energy & force?
(Physicist answer: W=F.d)

As an answer, they came up with the following five laws of forces and energy:

1. When forces transfer energy, they transfer kinetic energy.
2. Kinetic energy is present in all transfers and transformations (potential energy always transforms into or from kinetic energy).
   
3. (a) A force on an object in the direction of motion increases kinetic energy. (b) A force on an object opposite the direction of motion decreases kinetic energy. (c) A force on an object that is not in motion neither increases nor decreases kinetic energy. (d) Forces within objects transmit energy.
   
4. Transfers of energy are due to contact forces. Transformations of energy are due to non-contact forces.
5. Forces transfer or transform energy proportional to their magnitude.

To check these laws, they invented another kind of "Energy Theater Diagram" which they used to determine the relationship between forces and energy transfers and transformations in a particular scenario. Below are a couple frames from a movie of a hand pushing a ball under water, and a picture of a diagram on the front board picture representing the analysis of a single time step in this movie:




The idea is that you draw all the forces in the scenario, and each force must correspond to a transfer or transformation of energy, or you have to use the laws to explain why it doesn't. For example, Fbh, the force of the ball on the hand, corresponds to 2KEh -> 2KEb, or the transfer of 2 units of kinetic energy from the hand to the ball. This is a transfer of kinetic energy, consistent with laws 1 and 2, it is in the direction of motion and giving kinetic energy to the ball, consistent with law 3, it is a contact force transferring energy, consistent with law 4, and the number of energy units, 2, is determined in relationship to the number of energy units involved in other transfers and transformations by the relative magnitudes of the forces, consistent with law 5.

This was a very disciplined use of diagrams, and led to lots of questions (and answers) about the scenario that would not have come up otherwise. Leslie and I are still talking about exactly how to analyze this, but one idea would be to look at the questions it produces and how commitment to the laws and the representation leads to these questions.

Energy Theater Diagrams E1 Examples

Here are some examples of the Energy Theater Diagrams that E1 used this summer (2011).  I thought it might be interesting to look at these and compare them to your ideas. 
1. This first one is interesting because it circles the final energy form and uses arrows to show us the progression of an energy chunk.

2. This next one is really different than our version - it uses different moments in time to show the progression of the energy. Does this work for your rules?  How would the arrows work here or could they work?

3. Here is a third example of the energy involved in a light bulb.  They use arrows as well.  It might be interesting to do "our version" of energy theater diagrams for these and compare the situations.

ET for Raising and Lowering a Ball at Const. Vel. Part 2

Rachel and I have again reconstructed our ideas about raising a ball at constant velocity and also worked on lowering the ball at constant velocity. Below show our pictures of these ideas.  We have made changes we *hope* will reflect a better snapshot of what is happening.

• Kinetic Energy Issue: We took out steps 3 and 4 (not just 3 as Lane mentioned in the previous post's comments) because we agreed that the ball would then be gaining kinetic energy. We did not put in an extra K in the ball and the hand because we believe that it is evident that the ball is moving because of the gain in gravitational energy. 
• Friction btwn Ball and Air: We also felt better about our ideas surrounding the friction of the air with the ball/hand because we added in a K for the air. This K is the bulk movement of the air as it gets pushed out of the way by the ball/hand. We called this "macro" movement. As a secondary process, this "macro" movement dissipates into smaller "micro" movements, which we represented by transforming the K to a T in the air. 
• We drew new BLUE arrows to represent this change and I thought perhaps this might be related to entropy??
• Overall Effort from the Human: We erased some of the C-->T transformations in the hand during the lowering process based upon our observations that the body gets warmer when "walking up stairs" as opposed to "walking down stairs" at the same rate.  We are still unsure about this and how it relates (or if it relates) to the fact that the force exerted by the arm/body on the hand is the the same for both situations!  
• How can it be that you are exerting the same force (doing the same work) but using more energy? 

Raising the Ball at constant speed: 

 

Lowering the Ball at constant speed: 

Therapy?

Leslie Atkins relayed the following conversation she had with a student:

A student stayed after class yesterday and said to me: "you talk just like my dad does -- and he's a psychotherapist.  Have you been a therapist in the past?"
Me: "what do you mean?"
Her: "You say things like -- 'what I hear you saying is... did I get that right?" and "Can you say more, I'm not sure what you mean?" 

I think it's a good sign.

Me too!

Energy Theater Diagrams

When I'm figuring out the energy dynamics of some system by myself, or with one other person, I can't do it with energy theater, because there aren't enough people.  I could use energy blocks, but I am usually trying to document the analysis that's being conducted, so I need something static that I can take a photo of and post to a blog.  I've settled on a representation that works pretty darned well for me, which I call an "energy theater diagram."  Benedikt and I used (developed?) this kind of diagram to analyze refrigerator energy dynamics last year (part 1, part 2).  The rules of the diagram are:

• Each object in the scenario gets a designated area of the whiteboard.
• Each unit of energy is represented by a letter.  The letter tells you the form of the energy: T for thermal, K for kinetic, etc.
• Arrows on the diagram represent transfers and/or transformations of energy.  If K in one object --> K in another object, the "-->" represents transfer, as if we were mapping the path of a walking person in energy theater.  If K-->T, that's transformation, which in energy theater is shown by a person changing handsigns, nothing to do with movement.  (In the analysis Benedikt and I did, we sometimes show both happening at once and symbolize it with a single arrow.  People often do both at once in energy theater, too.)

Abby and I are using energy theater diagrams to figure out the energy dynamics of a hand lifting and lowering a ball.  It's very challenging and we're still in the process.  As we were accounting for each of the transfers and transformations that we were indicating, we decided on a new rule for energy theater diagrams:

• The color of an arrow corresponds to the process by which energy is transferred or transformed.

For example, we used red arrows for conduction (the warm hand transfers thermal energy to the cool ball), purple arrows for forces (the hand pushes the ball), and orange arrows for metabolism (exertion warms the hand).  

We did this in order to help ourselves keep track of our own reasoning, and I loooove it for that.  I feel like it really captures a new and important kind of information that I want to include in my analysis.  (I sort of did this a little bit in the refrigerator analysis, but not systematically.)  And guess what:  because we were being accountable in a new way, we immediately found ourselves faced with new questions.  They are killer questions - we can't answer them yet!  and they were forced on us by the representation.  We'll tell you about it when we're ready to post about the ball-lowering scenario.

A different kind of diagram development was in response to our finding ourselves making multiple drafts of our diagram, not only because we changed our minds, but also just to tidy it up.  We think magnetic letters would help us organize our presentation better.  Kids' alphabet magnets would be cute, but the colors are wrong and there are not enough of the letters we will need.  We are in the process of obtaining a large supply of blank white magnetic squares, which I intend to mark up with C's and K's and T's and so on.

ET for Raising a Ball at a constant velocity

Rachel and I have been working on our idea of what the energy theater would look like for the scenario of lifting (and eventually lowering) a ball at a constant velocity. We have made the following assumptions about the scenario:
1. The ball and hand start with no G's (gravitational energy)
2. The air starts with no energy. :)
3. The hand starts with as many C's as we will need
4. The ball and hand will both wind up with the same G's (assuming same mass).
5. The ball and hand have the same K's throughout the scenario.

Here is what we came up with initially.  The arrow color indicates "the reason" behind the transfer or transformation.  The key to the colors is at the bottom of the picture.  Metabolism (orange) indicates that there is some form of bodily process going on to transform the energy. Force (purple) here indicates a contact force (push from hand or ball) or friction (between air and ball).  Conduction (red) indicates thermal energy transferring by touching (hand to ball or hand to air). Finally, gravity (green) is sort of an uncomfy one for us.  It is our only non-contact force.  More is said about this below. The circled numbers correspond with the numbers in the list.  The list is also retyped here to make sure it is readable:
1. Hand warms ball - this assumes that the hand is at a higher temperature than the ball. AND probably we should have drawn a C --> T for the first T in this part like we did for number 8.
*2. Hand "moves" "up"
3. Hand move
4. Hand moves ball
*5. Hand moves ball "up"
*6. Hand moves ball and friction warms ball
*7. Hand moves ball and friction warms air
8. Hand warms air
9. Hand warms with effort

One note here is that for a given instant, the K's would be the same for both the ball and the hand, but here we have shown all of the transfers and transformations so if you look at all of the end results you will see that the hand and ball only have one K each, one G each, and different amounts of T.

So here is where we need to think more:
A.   For numbers 2 and 5, our question became where does the earth come into this diagram?  How do we talk about a force transforming energy without the object that is causing that force in the diagram?
B.   For numbers 6 and 7, we talk about friction warming both the air and the ball as they move against each other, but how does the friction between the air and the ball make kinetic energy in the ball transfer to thermal energy in the ball?   It seems like the air should be involved in this transfer inside the ball.  Additionally, I struggle with the idea that you can't have one without the other because they happen simultaneously.

These questions seem to be related to each other. They both address an internal transformation of energy that is caused by an interaction with or force by an outside object.  E2 talked a lot about forces and their role in ET, but both Rachel and I were focusing on E1 this summer.  Is there an easy explanation to these questions?