1. Energy and its many forms
In this unit we are learning about different
types of energy:
Kinetic energy
Potential energy
Heat
This poster covers a lab about heat and phase transitions
Understanding Energy is a major component of the NYS Physics
Standards for high school students
Edwin Pell
Email: edpell3@gmail.com
March 20, 2012

2. Lab Goals
Observe what effects removing energy from a liquid has:
Temperature
Global structure changes, liquid versus solid
Specific energy and changes in specific energy
Thinking about the ways heat energy is stored:
Vibrational
Rotational
Translational
Literature research
Writing on research findings

3. This experiment uses a beaker of water in a bowl of dry ice
Data is gathered with an electronic temperature probe
Data is stored and
graphed on a laptop
computer

4. Here is what the students first see
It should be familiar from previous knowledge

5. Next the students see this result
This is new and unknown to the students, they now have a
puzzle to research
Some may choose to end the experiment here

6. Back to familiar territory, but why has the specific heat
changed?

7. More weirdness, why can't it be simple like in the textbook?
Students must ponder what is causing the curved approach
to -40 degrees.

8. After the student has done research in the literature on
phase changes the lab writeup is done
The format for the writeup is:
Title
Method
Variables
Data
Calculations
Results and what Caused them
Summary
For this lab the causes part will require writing at length
about literature research results.

9. This unit started with large scale macroscopic examples of
kinetic energy like sledding down hill. In this later lab we are
exploring microscopic kinetic energy of molecules to store
energy in the form of heat.
We have moved from the concrete to the abstract.