Abigail Daane IRISE Presentation E2

Slide 1

Slide 2

The above slide 2 should look vaguely familiar to those who saw my understanding energy presentation. I didn't spend much time on describing my background because most people in this group know my background.

Slide 3

 Again - slide 3 should look familiar to UE peeps, but the point of slide three is to orient people to my interest in thermal energy and its special status from last year.  I feel like this is especially relevant to this presentation, because part of the reason I picked out this sequence of episodes was that the ideas from last year appeared to influence this year's focus and attention to thermal energy.

Slide 4

Slide 4 gets into the new data from E2. The sequence of videos I present below are all from the same post from a couple of weeks ago found here. The claim I make is that the teachers from E1 last year, in this case Kim and Jessica, use thermal energy to the the scapegoat for the energy they see as imperceptible.  I used the word scapegoat as sort of a "first order idea" that they settle on immediately.  I didn't really think about using the word "scapegoat" to be a finished product and some people seemed to worry about using that word.  Here are two definitions stolen from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/scapegoat:

Scapegoat
1.      a person or group made to bear the blame for others or to suffer in their place.

2.

Chiefly Biblical . a goat  let loose in the wilderness on Yom Kippur after the high priest symbolically laid the sins of the people on its head. Lev. 16:8,10,26.

Suggestions from Brian, Sam, Rachel, (and others?) were made to change scapegoat to:
- "pinning it on thermal" or
- "thermal is a catch all" or
- "thermal is an assumption" or
- "thermal is a way of glossing over the ideas".
Brian, correct me if I am wrong, but I think that you were reacting to the negative context of scapegoat.  However, I think that it really is suggested to 'bear the blame/responsibility for others' in this case.

After a long conversation though, it seems to me that I now interpret this set of videos a bit differently in terms of what Kim may or may not be thinking.  Originally, I think that Kim does suggest it all goes to thermal, however, she doesn't immediately suggest the idea that the car bounces back, so I think that she is thinking of an inelastic collision, where it is like a lump of clay and the energy all ends up as thermal energy.
Some suggested that she was looking at the initial and final state only, not at the process in between.  This is definitely not ruled out for me yet, but I am going to push back on what Sam and Brian said about her thinking of only the final state, because she tries to justify the thermal going back into kinetic by using the squash ball example. (This is not in the sequence of videos I post, but in between them). In this situation, she says that you have to warm up the ball to make it elastic - so you have thermal energy making it more elastic.
In talking to Sam after the Congress, it seems that another option might be that Kim had two ideas, one about the inelastic collision (where she suggested thermal energy) and one about the thermal going into kinetic, but that she didn't connect those ideas until Stamatis brought them up again.

Jessica, on the other hand, was operating under the assumption that the energy went from KE -> TE -> KE. I was under the impression that Kim was following what Jessica was saying, and that she agreed, but some pointed out she could have been agreeing without listening/hearing what Jessica was saying.

Slide 5

Slide 5 introduced Video 2 where Stamatis asks "What process takes thermal energy and turns it into kinetic energy?"  The teachers respond easily with several examples, a generator, combustion, a firecracker.  However, they seem not to understand that this question was in reference to the situation at hand.  Jessica realizes it later and is quick to then draw the conclusion that Stamatis doesn't think it is possible for thermal energy to transform into kinetic energy in this scenario.

Brian pointed out that teachers use lots of examples of thermal turning into kinetic energy (popcorn jumping off the skillet, bacon grease, or water popping off the hot skillet). I have never thought about these examples before, and I need to think about them some more.

Slide 6

Slide 6 is about video 3, which follows Kim's description of squash balls needing thermal energy to be bouncy. This idea seems to imply that she is trying to justify the idea that thermal energy is being used to bounce the car back and turns into kinetic energy.  However, I need to go back and look at this part of the video to see if that is actually the case, now that I have increased my understandings of the number of possible interpretations about what Kim was thinking.  In Video 3, this is the first time that elastic energy is mentioned at all.  Akbar uses Kim's example of the squash ball to build upon it and suggest elastic energy as being the reason it bounces off.  Jessica takes up that idea.

Slide 7

In Slide 7, video 4 shows Kim apparently not realizing/hearing/understanding/connecting the idea that thermal energy had been suggested to be in the middle of the process until Stamatis is restating what was said previously.

Someone pointed out (I think Alex) that because they were thinking of the chair as the only other object in the scenario, that perhaps it was more aligned with the general ideas the teachers have about the environment, and our ideas about the environment essentially being a pool or reservoir for thermal energy.

Slide 8

The Takeaways:
1. There was an assumption made that the imperceptible energy was thermal energy, before the process was dissected and a mechanism was identified.
2. This was one of the few examples that Stamatis has seen where the teachers suggest that the thermal energy converts back into kinetic energy.

After my presentation:
Stamatis mentioned that my AAPT talk went over well with the teachers, and that my efforts to make them understand how important their ideas were to my research was well-received. This was really good to hear.  I sincerely hope that they choose to stay involved with the EP, and that we have a chance to go to their classrooms more to observe them in action.  Also, I wanted to make sure that I recorded the fact that Leslie was worried about how sound was involved in spreading energy and how that tied into our story.  I replied that sound and light have not been a major focus yet, but that those ideas need to be included in the story.  He also suggested I look at the KWE (Kinetic Wave Energy) discussions of E2 to check for connections to spreading.

Next Steps: 
1. Watch the squash ball part with Sam.
2. Talk about how this relates back to the other videos.  Sam suggested that their readily available examples of how thermal energy is perceptible and can be used productively help to point out that teachers do not always view thermal energy as useless, degraded, or imperceptible.  This seems to imply that there is something about the scale/amount of thermal energy that is important.  The smaller amounts seem imperceptible, and yet the large amounts are significant and easy to perceive.
3. Check out the KWE discussions in E2 to see if that relates to energy spreading.
4. Theoretical ties?  Do I have any? I feel like I didn't include any theory. Hm.