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.
Tomme's comment in segment 2 about heat energy being a "dead end" is the same language that Nina used in E2 about thermal energy. I'm not exactly sure how this connects with Tomme's wavelength issue (which I still don't understand), but I find it interesting that this language for heat energy keeps popping up (e.g. Abby's EPSRI Congress presentation).
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