‘Energy and power: a coherent framework for teachers of 14-16 year old children’

Energy and power options are never far from the news. Right now, nuclear is front page again. Quantification is all important: it’s access to enough power that we want. What we pay for is the accumulated usage of this power over time (hence the kilowatt-hour). Energy is important; power perhaps more so.

In this session we’ll develop, by looking at common examples, a shared language so that processes, situations, problems can be discussed, modelled, and common patterns seen across very different topics.

The selection of pedagogically helpful examples is more important that trying to be exhaustive, given that, at school, and pre-16, we are only covering the first law of thermodynamics.

 Therefore the physics is all about quantification to determine what is not possible, not about predicting what will happen.

Under these circumstances, a primary focus on power, rather than on energy might be more appropriate, more connected to everyday concerns, and make for easier learning paths.

The paedagogy is all about choosing examples and situations that get to the fundamentals, rather than choosing  the right words, and enabling confidence in modelling situations and processes so that we can easily do the correct calculations, and undrstand what we have calculated.

The session will draw on materials from the SPT topics: Energy(11-14), Energy and electricity (14-16) and maybe Radiations(14-16).

 

What we’ll think through together will form the basis for using the SPT materials for CPD with teachers of 11-16 year old pupils.

Here is the idea space we pootled around during the session.

 

 

Here are some resources:

The pouring energy sheets

The interactives are in the SPT materials – available from TalkPhysics

 

The aide memoire for SPT representations.

 

 

1301054325task sheets.pdf

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