High school 3rd year physics assessment: thermal expansion and energy in the form of heat.

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Hello friends, in this opportunity I want to share with all of you an educational topic of high school physics.

Besides being a university professor Endo of I teach calculus II and calculus III, I also teach in an institution at secondary level where I teach the subjects of chemistry and physics in 3rd, 4th and 5th year.

On Friday morning I applied a written evaluation regarding the topic of thermal expansion and energy in the form of heat.

Days before the written exam I gave the students an exercise activity, where they could. Practice some proposed exercises to discuss them in class, where even they can participate and comment on the various forms of resolution, and where the principle of meaningful learning is valued, where it is very important the doubts generated to build new knowledge.

This activity prior to the written exam had a weighting of 5 points, and that added to the 15 points of the value of the written test gives an evaluation value of 20 points.

The exercises proposed for the written test are the following:

With the first exercise, the student should be able to demonstrate his ability to find the final length of the copper wire when it is subjected to a temperature increase of 180 degrees Celsius, for this it is necessary that the student considers a thermal expansion coefficient of 0.000017/°C.

For this calculation it is important that the student knows how to clear from the equations involved the final length, especially considering that copper as well as other metals increase their length (dilate) when subjected to temperature increases.

For the second and third exercise it is important that the student considers that every time a material gives or gains heat is because it loses or gains heat energy, this energy that is gained or lost can be quantified in units of calories, even can be quantified even in cases where two bodies interact, one of lower temperature and one of higher temperature 🌡️.

Logically in this interaction will have an energy in the form of heat (Q) of negative value the body that loses temperature and gives up that heat, and the body that increases in temperature will have an energy in the form of positive heat (Q = +) as it receives all that energy from the other body.

In the evaluations of this type of content, I particularly like to discuss with students all the variants pre and post evaluation, all with the aim of generating meaningful learning, especially taking advantage of the fact that physics is a very important science and lends itself to make examples and comparisons of important topics like this with real life experiences.