Heat and temperature

A unit and heat, temperature, and the difference between heat and temperature began with an older video from 1980 that rather concisely and accurately covers the two concepts in a series of six videos. The videos also introduce terminology and vocabulary carefully, covering a number of topics.

On Wednesday the freezer was broken for my demonstration of the Celsius temperature scale. I bought ice and vegetable oil at the store. Some of the ice was used to demonstrate zero degrees Celsius, the rest was used to chill a small beaker of vegetable oil. Another beaker of congealed cooled coconut oil was used to demonstrate the melting temperature of coconut oil. A third small beaker of oil was put on the hot plate, that would rapidly start smoking up around 300 degrees Celsius - which is when I discovered I lacked a hot pad to remove the small beaker.


I also covered the mathematics underneath calculating heat capacity from a change in temperature.



Sweetmarshya "Marcia" and times and reads temperature data, Nemely records

The lab on Thursday was an investigation of Newton's law of cooling.


At the start of class I left open the possibilities for cooling.


I ran data up onto the television in real time using the ChromeBook.


With curves well established by the 45 to 60 minute mark, I presented Newton's Law of Cooling formula. While I noted that 100 ℃ is the theoretic hot temperature and 30 ℃ is the theoretic room temperature, allowing these to "float" as variables produces a better fit to the data. High humidity usually inveighs against reaching room temperature.


Note that Desmos is case sensitive permitting the somewhat confusing use of lowercase t for time and uppercase T for Temperature. H6 is the hot temperature, R6 the room temperature, the six referring to the sixth group.


On Friday the class explored temperatures around campus using an infrared thermometer. Temperatures ranged from -12 ℃ in a freezer to over 50 ℃ on the pavement. This activity could benefit from having a class set of infrared thermometers and having the students attempt to find the hottest and coldest temperatures on campus.

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