I just listened to Rachel give her talk and I have so much running through my mind about the ontologies of energy! Wow! I found the metaphors for energy to be all different ideas that have surfaced in my classroom in the past. I feel like the most common idea is that energy is a substance, but perhaps I think this way because I use this for my metaphor! A couple of different moments over the last couple of days have stuck out to me as times when people were grappling with their understanding of energy through Energy Theatre. I was thinking of a moment when the teachers were doing ET in the E1 afternoon session (110809 1238 T6 & ET video at time 08:32), Rich talks about the higher potential energy, which I *think* is getting at the idea that energy is a vertical location. (Rachel - can you please fix this if I am wrong?!) In the same video, (110809 1238 T6 & ET video at time 10:12ish) David said, "And can we represent, like, the amount of energy by the size of the person?" His idea that they should use the smallest people for the thermal energy that is always in the objects vs. the larger people for kinetic. Lane then told them that each person represented the same amount of energy. I feel like David was thinking of mass as the "Substance" in this case, instead of number of people representing the relative energy.
Have you seen other examples this week?
Hmm, I wonder if David is also thinking about energy as a vertical location, since he wants to map the amount of energy to the height of the participants (at least that's how I interpret that statement)... Can you elaborate on the idea to use the smallest people for thermal energy? Is that because the thermal energy is less than other energies? I feel like there's an embedded violation of energy conservation...
ReplyDeleteAlso, I really like how you specify the location of an episode in the video files. I have not been very consequent with this, myself, and I would like to encourage us all to follow Abi's example and clearly mark the location of an episode in the big video files, so that we can go back and look at the context of the episode later, if necessary.
David's idea was cut short because of time management. However, I believe that he thought thermal energy is constant inside an object and is a small amount of energy (only worth one small person) compared to the energy that is being transferred from KE to TE (involving lots of people) when the ring was sliding across the floor. Does this make sense?
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