Tuesday morning, for the four of us who observe during the afternoon, was a technical session to get our episodes ready. For me to find an episode was a matter to go back to my Monday field notes and look for the FLAG tags I used. Then I checked the video on those and decided which episode was worth to share.
Context:
The activity started in a very non traditional way. They were talking about travel agency, they were asked to imagine what features they needed to include in a travel webpage, and then what values will be included for each feature (for example, a feature was transportation, the values were airplane, train, car, etc.).
Then they were asked to do the same for energy. I copy our (Brad and I) field notes on the instructions:
I didn't focus on the confusion around the activity because I was not familiarized with the expectations of that activity. But I got super interested in how they were proposing work as a feature of energy. The way they discuss work and also on their description on why/how potential gravitational energy is doing work (it is only a couple seconds they talk about this).
At the beginning they are pretty sure on work happens in a lot of different forms of energy, they quickly list them. They all seem to agree (or at least no one objects or question them). Will (with the khaki shorts) and John (in the back to the right) are listing the different energy where you can find work. Then Fred (next to will with the name tag) tries to introduce the formal definition of work.
In the past summer teaching seminar they worked on trying to distinguish between work and energy, while here they are trying to label energy as always involving work (at the beginning of the conversation shown).
Firstly, I'm pretty sure one of them said work is a force divided by distance. I would prefer force TIMES distance for the rudimentary definition and then either summations or integrals and dot products in increasingly more sophisticated ways of defining work.
ReplyDeleteBUT, that aside...this is actually a really interesting point. I'm not sure if I can argue against work being a feature of energy. Energy can lead to work being done, as well as radiating and heating. Or maybe working, radiating, and heating are all values of the feature "energy change leads to..."
I wasn't a huge fan of the "feature and value" activity. It felt a bit ambiguous and confusing - hence the really random conversations that different tables had (see my post for a completely different example). But within this activity as stated, work certainly must fit in somewhere. Maybe one can make an argument for it being a feature.
I hear him talking about a force "over" distance (not divided by) which he could be saying force over a distance (which is like saying times) instead of "divided by." Do others hear this?
DeleteI agree, Brad, that work is definitely an important connection to energy and I think their conversation is interesting about when work is there and what is required for work to be going on. I love the "Squishing" comment! Gravitational potential is "pressing down on the object that is holding it up"...this is super interesting to me. This conversation has a TON of juicy ideas in it!! I love it.
So, one week later I am checking on the comments to see how I think about my previous posts.
DeleteI am starting to think that in English and Spanish using the term "over" have the same implications, correct me if I am wrong. Hearing someone says force "over" time can have two connotations. One is taking the literal mathematics operation (division) or we can go and try to understand what they mean with that. Over time can also implies for an extended period of time instead of a single instant. This makes me link this comment to yesterday whole I-RISE video discussion on what Rachel said. Opening that door to not discard the ideas and instead trying to understand where they are coming from can let us know if they meant a division or an integral (over a period time).
Forces and Energy...
DeleteThis is the second time that I see this "let's spend a day (or more in this case) talking about force". It is quite of disturbing signing for an energy thing and spending that much time in forces. But then you realize oooh, there was a purpose on this.
Right now I am working in an ET video analysis where they are having problems telling the energy stories. They explicitly say they have difficulties wording the energy leaving the force story aside. It means, they sometimes try to talk about the energy but refer to the forces involved in it. Thanks to the differentiation made during this forces sessions (and I am sure always their previous knowledge on it also) they are aware when they mixed the stories and try to go back to analyze the energy only.