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!

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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