All of our use with simulators to show what particles in a gas are doing have been truly insightful! Here are some big ideas we came up with:
1. Particles with more kinetic energy transfer them to particles with less kinetic energy.
2. When you add more particles to a system, the total kinetic energy increases.
3. It seems like the temperature of a system has to be an average, as there are fast moving particles and slow moving particles with the same sample, and yet the temperature stays the same!
We also began looking at a solids simulator, as the particles in a solid are really important, too! They are what holds a liquid and act as a barrier between the liquid and the air around it (oh, and we saw how gases can impact both solids and liquids)!
1. Particles with more kinetic energy transfer them to particles with less kinetic energy.
2. When you add more particles to a system, the total kinetic energy increases.
3. It seems like the temperature of a system has to be an average, as there are fast moving particles and slow moving particles with the same sample, and yet the temperature stays the same!
We also began looking at a solids simulator, as the particles in a solid are really important, too! They are what holds a liquid and act as a barrier between the liquid and the air around it (oh, and we saw how gases can impact both solids and liquids)!
First and foremost, we saw that like gases and liquids, solids can transfer energy, too, albeit just slower (and this makes sense since there are LOTS of particles in solids). We also saw that when one solid was bigger than another, that bigger solid seems to make more of an impact (when it's hotter, of course). And we also saw that as the area in contact increases, the energy transfer is faster. Regardless of the setup, we also saw what seems to be a reoccurring pattern: the heat transfers to the cold.