SC.912.P.10.2

An introduction to the Law of Conservation of Energy within the confines of open, closed, and isolated systems.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lab, students will use the law of conservation of energy to design and test insulators made with various materials.

Type: Lesson Plan

This lesson is designed to be part of a sequence of lessons. It follows resource 52648 "BIOSCOPES Summer Institute 2013 - Forces" and precedes resource 52957 "BIOSCOPES Summer Institute 2013 - Thermal Energy." This lesson uses a predict, observe, and explain approach along with inquiry based activities to enhance student understanding of the conservation of energy.

Type: Lesson Plan

Using inquiry techniques, students, working in groups, are asked to design and conduct experiments to test the Law of Conservation of Energy and the Law of Conservation of Momentum. Upon being provided with textbooks, rulers, measuring tapes, stopwatches, mini-storage containers, golf balls, marbles, rubber balls, steel balls, and pennies, they work cooperatively to implement and revise their hypotheses. With limited guidance from the teacher, students are able to visualize the relationships between mass, velocity, height, gravitational potential energy, kinetic energy, and total energy as well as the relationships between mass, velocity, and momentum.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students compete with one another to design and build a roller coaster from insulation tubing and tape that will allow a marble to travel from start to finish with the lowest average velocity. In so doing, students learn about differences between distance and displacement, speed and velocity, and potential and kinetic energy. They also examine the Law of Conservation of Energy and concepts related to force and motion.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will research various types of amusement park rides and use their findings to design a feasible ride of their own. They will summarize their findings and present their ride design to the class. Each student will then write a persuasive letter to a local amusement park describing the reasons their ride design is the best.

Type: Lesson Plan

Shape Memory Alloys are metals that can return to or 'remember' their original shape. They are a cutting edge application for Chemistry, Physics, and Integrated Science. The activities in this lesson work well for the study of forces, Newton's Laws, and electricity in physics. They also lend themselves well to crystalline structures, heat of reaction, and bonding in chemistry. In addition, students could study applications for the materials in the medical and space industries.

Type: Lesson Plan

This topic is broken into units to help in formulating cohesive, effective lessons. Clicking on each unit title will display appropriate activities, lesson plans, or labs. Units are intended to help students understand the interconnectedness of the concepts of conservation of energy, momentum and angular momentum underpinning the basis for much of physics. Units are not listed in a prescribed order.

Type: Resource Collection

Students will determine the specific heat of a metal using the law of conservation of energy.

Type: Teaching Idea

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute in Dresden have developed an energy-efficient fuel cell superior to combustion engines and other traditional ways of heating homes. The stacked fuel cells convert natural gas directly into electrical energy without resulting in energy loss. The fuel cell prototypes are being tried in homes and signal promise for the future.

Type: Text Resource

This resource is intended to support reading in the content area. Chemists create pyrotechnics to give viewers the most spectacular fireworks show that they can by using basic chemistry concepts and physics. Readers of this article might be surprised to learn that conserving energy, preventing explosions, and cooling-down reactions are part of this process.

Type: Text Resource

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. The article discusses the concept of phase change materials (PCM) and how they can be used to maintain constant temperatures through application of the Law of Conservation of Energy and energy transfer.

Type: Text Resource

Vast collection of multimedia resources in mechanics, waves and relativity.

Type: Virtual Manipulative