What's Hot and What's Not?

With the help of simple, teacher-led demonstration activities, students learn the basic physics of heat transfer by means of conduction, convection, and radiation. They also learn about examples of heating and cooling devices, from stove tops to car radiators, that they encounter everyday in their homes, schools, and modes of transportation. Since in our everyday lives there are many times that we want to prevent heat transfer, students also consider ways that conduction, convection, and radiation can be reduced or prevented from occurring. With the help of simple, teacher-led demonstration activities, students learn the basic physics of heat transfer by means of conduction, convection, and radiation and demonstrate through experiments.

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What's Hot and What's Not?

Standards & Objectives

Learning objectives:

After this lesson, students should be able to:

Define the terms conduction, convection and radiation in the context of heat transfer.
Describe everyday examples of ways people try to cause or prevent heating and cooling by conduction, convection and radiation.
Give examples of materials that serve well for heating by conduction, convection and radiation.

Lesson Variations

Blooms taxonomy level:

Understanding

Extension suggestions:

Have students design and conduct simple experiments to compare the rate of cooling of a beaker (or soda can) of hot water placed in front of a small electric fan (forced convection) to an identical beaker of hot water that is left alone (natural convection).
Have students design and conduct experiments to test the insulating abilities of materials designed to be insulators, such as fiberglass building insulation (wear household rubber gloves to avoid irritation of hands and wrists), feathers from an old pillow, or cut up parts of a winter coat, blanket, or sleeping bag from a thrift store.
Have students conduct library and/or Internet research to find further examples of ways in which animals living in cold climates stay warm, and animals living in hot climates stay cool.

References

Contributors:

Originator:

Ayers Institute for Learning & Innovation

eduToolbox® is a resource-sharing portal developed by the Ayers Institute for Learning & Innovation with collaborative support and funding from the Tennessee Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Education's Math & Science Partnership program.