This post is one of the many many interesting things I saw today.
Today I saw my first energy theater, and I was struck by how
the participants acted it out in “a round”.
I’ll go ahead and describe what I mean by that.
To simplify what was happening, they were modeling energy
transformations from potential to kinetic to thermal energy. They sort of naturally moved through these
transformations in a “follow the leader” fashion; the first person to transform
to kinetic was also the first person to transform to thermal. The song “Row row row your boat” comes to
mind. It makes a lot of sense why they
would perform it in this way. It is a
lot easier to perform and interpret. Abby mentioned that this was the convention
from last year. I’m starting to wonder
if there are any other reasons why this would be the case. I say this because in my own interpretation,
I don’t think I envisioned energy transforming in this way. I don’t think there is any way to distinguish
which unit of energy changes at a certain time.
*I recognize that there are some instances where you could only perform
this in around (if we only had one energy unit in an intermediate form at a
given time), but in a situation in which energy transforms into one form and
sort of bunches up in an intermediate form, there doesn’t seem to be any reason
for the unit that entered that form first should be the first one to leave.
Gina, your comments at the end remind me of two similar things that happened in the E1 class today:
ReplyDeleteThe E1 class did their first energy theater activity today and also introduced energy cubes as another way of representing energy processes. The group I was observing was talking about the idea of doing energy cubes with just a single cube and focusing entirely on where that single "chunk" of energy is and what form of energy it is at any moment. Unfortunately they did not try this out. It would have been interesting to see how they played it out.
During the group discussion one of the teachers asked specifically about how well we can track energy in reality and whether talking about a specific "chunk" of energy being here first and later over there even made sense. I was really impressed with this discussion and with the teachers' ability to step back and ask "what's a representation and what's real?"
I think what makes this interesting is that for the actors, only the first person *really* needs to know what to do, the others can just follow the person ahead of them. I'm not saying that is what happens, just that you could perform the energy theatre with only one person remembering what to do, the others just watch and mimic what the personin front of them does.
ReplyDeleteBrian, I can't remember ever seeing an Energy Theater scenario in which only the first person needs to know what to do and everyone else just follows and does the same thing. I can imagine that this would be true for a very simple scenario in which energy transfers and transforms sequentially with no branches and always doing the same thing, but most scenarios are not like that. So I think what you were observing was probably a very special case.
ReplyDeleteI have actually seen this so many times - especially for beginning folks. I can think of several scenarios that lend themselves to this - the light bulb, the box sliding on the floor, just to name two. To me, it is a pretty typical situation, although sometimes there are two tracks/options, and people choose to follow one track or the other.
ReplyDelete