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Re: What Flows?



Marlyn Jakub says:

James, I don't have any evidence, but I do use a lecture-demo to minimize
first-year student's confusion over the thermal energy flow vs atomic
interaction concepts.

...(description of demo with blocks representing, um, internal energy)...


Sounds like a nice demo. If I understand correctly, the blocks (i.e., a
substance) are used to represent internal energy (not a substance, but a
characteristic).

Now here is the nub of my question: after this demo, do you find that the
students have any difficulty understanding that the thing represented by
the blocks was not a substance?

--
--James McLean
jmclean@chem.ucsd.edu
post doc
UCSD