Science Reasoning Center - Thermal Physics
You have reached the Construction Zone. As of April 1, 2023 the redo of our Science Reasoning Center was elevated to our top priority. We should have a large amount of content ready by August 1, 2023. We release content once it is ready, allowing teachers to preview and to test our latest creations for potential adoption into their curriculum and unit planning. You can stop by periodically to view our progress. It will be like watching a skyscraper being built ... only more exciting. You can also keep abreast of our developments by a periodic visit to the
What's New at TPC? page.
The
Legacy version of the Science Reasoning Center can be found
here.
Learn more:
About the Science Reasoning Center.
The following activities are planned for our Grand Opening. Once construction is completed, we will include a link to the activity:
Heating Curve
This activity describes the phase changes that occur in a sample of matter as it is heated from a temperature below its melting point to a temperature above its boiling point. In addition to the two paragraphs describing the state changes, a heating curve graph is included. Questions target a student's ability to use the model presented in the body of text to interpret the graph, to connect information in the body of text to the graph, and to compare various points on the graph to one another in terms of the state of matter that is present and the process (state change or temperature increase) that is occurring.
Linear Expansion of Materials
This activity describes in quantitative terms the linear expansion that materials undergo when heated. The passage includes an equation, a table of coefficients of expansion, and a graph. Questions target a student's ability to use an equation to make predictions, to draw conclusions that are consistent with a model, to select points on a graph, to combine data from a table and a graph in order to compare the expansion of a material under various circumstances, to extrapolate outside the range of values provided by a graph, and to combine data from a table and a graph to make predictions about the amount of expansion a given length of material would undergo.