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Copyright: kidzsearch
2013

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Mechanical energy Facts for Kids | KidzSearch.com

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The conservation of mechanical energy is a principle which states that under certain conditions, the total mechanical energy of a system is constant. This rule does not hold when mechanical energy is converted to other forms, such as chemical, nuclear, or electromagnetic.

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Copyright: kidzsearch
2013

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Potential Facts for Kids | KidzSearch.com

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Content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use Privacy Policy. Content of this web page is sourced from wikipedia ( http://simple.wikipedia.org). Some content of the original page may have been edited to make it more suitable for younger readers, unless otherwise noted.

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Author: kidzsearch
Copyright: Copyright

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Kinetic energy Facts for Kids | KidzSearch.com

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Kinetic energy is the energy which moving objects have. You can think of Kinetic energy as the energy of movement, because it refers to any object that is moving at that present time.

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Copyright: kidzsearch
2014

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Scientists now know that matter can be made into energy, and energy into matter, through processes like nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. The law of conservation of energy has therefore been extended to become the Law of conservation of matter and energy. Albert Einstein was the first to mathematically derive this in the formula E = mc 2.

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CC-ND:Thunderbolt Kids

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Fossil fuels like coal were made from prehistoric plants. The plants took up energy from the Sun and stored it in their bodies. Millions of years ago, the Earth was mostly covered by water. The plants that died sank to the bottom of the water.

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PD: PhET, University of Colorado
2017

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Explore the forces at work when pulling against a cart, and pushing a refrigerator, crate, or person. Create an applied force and see how it makes objects move. Change friction and see how it affects the motion of objects.

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: PhET, University of Colorado
2017

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Description

Learn about the conservation of energy at the skate park! Build tracks, ramps, and jumps for the skater. View the skater's kinetic energy, potential energy, and thermal energy as they move along the track. Measure the speed and adjust the friction, gravity, and mass.

Sample Learning Goals

Explain the Conservation of Mechanical Energy using kinetic, gravitational potential, and thermal energy.

Describe how changing the mass, friction, or gravity affects the skater's energy.

Predict position or estimate speed from energy bar graph or pie chart.

Calculate speed or height at one position from information about a different position.

Describe what happens to the energy in the system when the reference height changes.

Design a skate park using the concepts of mechanical energy and energy conservation.

Overview of sim controls, model simplifications, and insights into student thinking ( PDF ).

Teacher-Submitted Activities

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Learn about the conservation of energy at the skate park! Build tracks, ramps, and jumps for the skater. View the skater's kinetic energy, potential energy, and thermal energy as they move along the track. Measure the speed and adjust the friction, gravity, and mass.

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PD: PhET, University of Colorado
2017

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Description

Explore how heating and cooling iron, brick, water, and olive oil adds or removes energy. See how energy is transferred between objects. Build your own system, with energy sources, changers, and users. Track and visualize how energy flows and changes through your system.

Sample Learning Goals

Predict how energy will flow when objects are heated or cooled, or for objects in contact that have different temperatures.

Describe the different types of energy and give examples from everyday life.

Describe how energy can change from one form of energy into another.

Explain conservation of energy in real-life systems.

Design a system with energy sources, changers, and users and describe how energy flows and changes one form of energy into another.

Tell the energy story for real-life systems.

Overview of sim controls, model simplifications, and insights into student thinking ( PDF ).

Teacher-Submitted Activities

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Explore how heating and cooling iron, brick, water, and olive oil adds or removes energy. See how energy is transferred between objects. Build your own system, with energy sources, changers, and users. Track and visualize how energy flows and changes through your system.

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CC-ND: Thunderbolt Kids

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After going through this activity to identify what the output energy is (and there are often more than one), go through the appliances in which there are output energies which are incidental and not the main purpose of the appliance. For example in a lamp, the main purpose is to get light energy, but heat energy is also given off.

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Potential and Kinetic Energy Lesson For Kids

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Potential and Kinetic Energy Lesson For Kids

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Copyright: MakeMeGenius
2013

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Potential and Kinetic Energy Lesson for kids

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Attributed to Futurism
2014

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In the most broad sense of the term, energy is anything and everything that exists. Narrowing it down in a more precise manner, energy is the illusive quantity that allows a system to influence other systems. There are a great many different types of energy, and even more ways of categorizing those types of energy. Heat, light, and mass are probably the three most notable ways of quantifying individual factions.

technically is the study of heat, but it encompasses all forms of energy. So you know, thermodynamics is typically used to express entropy, and entropy can be used to express information. Yup. Information is energy. When I said energy is everything that exists I didn't mean it lightly. Though there are many types of energy, your question still stands: ? As per our current understanding of the universe, energy just is. It is the fundamental and abstract quantity that the entire universe and everything in it is made out of. So a more meaningful answer is that energy IS the universe (and the universe is energy).

How all of the different expressions of energy interact with each other is an intrinsically important concept in physics, because when you boil physics down to its most basic essence, it is simply the study of the nature and interactions taking place microscopically with the various forms of energy.

Since there isn't really a tangible definition for energy as a whole, I'll spend a little time on the more common ways of quantifying energy. Though I'd need to write an entire library of books to give sufficient information on every kind of energy, you should find the list suitable. Let's start with the most obvious form;

Light is probably the most interesting form of energy. It acts contrary to almost everything else. The easiest example of this is the fact that light, unlike anything else, is capable of going the speed of light (something that would prove disastrous to our understanding of physics if anything else could). Additionally the amount of energy in light has nothing to do with its speed. Light has a host of interesting qualities, like the quantum superposition between particle and wave, effects like red shift, the fact that the speed of light is intrinsically linked to energy (e = mc^2), and many more fascinating qualities.

Heat is most relevant when talking about atoms. Typically expressed as the level of excitement in the electrons, which can be seen by their orbits. Though that explanation seems painfully pedestrian compared to the reality of heat's significance. In physics, heat isn't talked about in that sense very often; instead it is thought of as entropy. Entropy can be explained several ways . A personal favorite of mine is by Leonard Susskind, who said (something similar to) "Entropy is the reason why it is a bad idea to park a sports car in a rain forest for 500 years." Entropy can be thought of as loss of information, decaying of a system, equalization of energy, and the reason why perpetual motion machines are absolutely impossible (no free energy for you).

A common joke about the first three laws of thermodynamics is that they are:
You can't win
You can't tie
You can't quit

In other words, if the economy worked like entropy did, the lowest amount you could spend to gain one dollar would be one dollar and one cent. Entropy is the universe's way of constantly causing you frustration, even if you don't realize it.

But entropy isn't actually all that bad. If it weren't for entropy, the universe would more or less be exactly as it was when it was brand new. Sure entropy causes organized systems to degrade (as in the sports car example), but if an existing system does not degrade there isn't much room for a new one to emerge.

The easiest way of expressing the energy in mass was done by Einstein in his immortal equation E = mc^2, but that might not bring it home to everyone. I'm going to conveniently ignore particle physics, because that would take a long time to even give an overview on, so instead I will catalog some of the more prominent ways that mass possesses the ability to affect other systems.

Kinetic energy:

Probably you are most familiar with. This is the reason why hammers can drive nails, steam can power trains, and bombs can blow up cities. Sated pretty nicely by Newton in his laws of motion, the gist of it is that stuff tends to remain the same until it runs into something else. So if something is standing still, it is inclined to stand still until something that is not standing still runs into it, and causes it to move. If something is moving it is inclined to continue moving in the same direction at the same speed until it runs into something else, in which case it can either change speed/direction, or stop entirely.

Potential energy:

Though a lot more complicated in chemistry, I'll summarize potential energy by saying it is kinetic energy that hasn't happened yet.

Gravity:

One of the properties of mass is gravity . Everything with mass has gravity, and everything with gravity has mass. This is biggest way that mass affects other systems, as it spreads at the speed of light in all directions, affecting everything else with mass in that radius. An interesting thing about gravity is that the value gets perpetually lower as the distance gets greater, but it will never equal zero. Given enough time, the gravity of anything will affect everything else. Pretty impressive when you consider that kinetic energy usually only affects one thing at a time.

Though this list is far from complete , now, at least you have a basic understanding of energy's importance (and significance) in physics.

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In the most broad sense of the term, energy is anything and everything that exists. Narrowing it down in a more precise manner, energy is the illusive quantity that allows a system to influence other systems. There are a great many different types of energy, and even more ways of categorizing those types of energy.