Our food coloring investigations is helping us see something we haven't considered before--that something is going on at the particle level. Using a particle simulator, we came up with the following ideas!
Cold particles still move in a cold liquid--they bump into one another and are pretty close to once another. Not every particle is moving at the same speed.
As you make the water warmer, the speed of the particles increases. The motion becomes faster and the space between the particles increases. The collisions get wild!
We figured there's a term for the motion of particles, and this is called kinetic energy. We wanted to know even more about what's going on with the particles, so we turned to another simulator to help! Since air surround our cups, which contain liquid, our next simulator focused on the air around our cups.
As you make the water warmer, the speed of the particles increases. The motion becomes faster and the space between the particles increases. The collisions get wild!
We figured there's a term for the motion of particles, and this is called kinetic energy. We wanted to know even more about what's going on with the particles, so we turned to another simulator to help! Since air surround our cups, which contain liquid, our next simulator focused on the air around our cups.
We came up with the following ideas using this new simulator:
1. At a given temperature, not all particles were moving the same (some were fast and others were slow).
2. Faster particles colliding with slower particles transferred their energy. Faster particles became slower and slower particles became faster.
3. Whenever we added more particles to the simulator, the total kinetic energy increased. This made sense to us because every particle carries energy with it, so when you increase the number of particles, you inadvertently increase the kinetic energy, too!
4. You could also increase the temperature, yet keep the number of particles the same. This also increased the kinetic energy!
We agreed that changing the simulator (aka "exploring" it) was fun, but challenging to narrow down any other ideas we might be missing! Tomorrow we agreed to run it in a more controlled way, which can hopefully help us consider some of these "colliding" ideas we're trying to figure out!
1. At a given temperature, not all particles were moving the same (some were fast and others were slow).
2. Faster particles colliding with slower particles transferred their energy. Faster particles became slower and slower particles became faster.
3. Whenever we added more particles to the simulator, the total kinetic energy increased. This made sense to us because every particle carries energy with it, so when you increase the number of particles, you inadvertently increase the kinetic energy, too!
4. You could also increase the temperature, yet keep the number of particles the same. This also increased the kinetic energy!
We agreed that changing the simulator (aka "exploring" it) was fun, but challenging to narrow down any other ideas we might be missing! Tomorrow we agreed to run it in a more controlled way, which can hopefully help us consider some of these "colliding" ideas we're trying to figure out!