Ways to talk about... Energy

In the last episode, Robin and Thomas were delighted to welcome Charles Tracy to talk about teaching energy at KS3. Charles generously agreed to come back for the next episode: energy at KS4

Charles lays out the rationale for talking energy using the correct terms: using adverbial forms really helps to enshrine the principal that energy is not a tangible ‘thing’ rather a quantity that we observe is conserved before and after a separate process has occurred. Energy is stored kinetically, gravitationally, chemically and so forth (nuclear-ly is still problematic though).

At KS4 the trick is to focus on the calculation. “If you’re not going to do a calculation, there’s no point talking energy”.

Links

• Our previous episode: The ” New” Model of Energy
• Teaching Secondary Physics Text Book (amazon or Millgate House)
• 9 Blogs from IoP about the New Energy Curriculu
• IoP Spark Questions about Energy (also available for download as a pdf)

Join in!

Please share ideas or successes – or indeed questions by messaging us on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/physicstp.bsky.social .  You can also message us via our website contact form on every page of the web site at  the.physicsteachingpodcast.com, or email using the address given in the podcast (if we remember). We are moving away from X but can be found there as @physicstp.

Music

• Season 7: Physics Is Our Business by Miracles of Modern Science.
• Seasons 5 and 6: Crescents by Ketsa.
• Seasons 3 and 4: Disco Sheik by Podington Bear.
• Seasons 1 and 2: One legged equilibrist polka by Circus Homunculus.
• Occasionally we also use Cantina Rag by Jackson F. Smith.

The music is used under the Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License

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