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(Group Leaders: David Sands and Yaron Lehavi)

This GTP combines the activities of the existing GTG on energy with a new theme of thermodynamics.

The teaching of energy has featured in GIREP seminars and conferences over many years, going back to the Cyprus conference in 2008. A GTG on energy was started in 2010 under the joint leadership of Marisa Michelini and Paula Heron following a workshop held at the Reims conference of that year. GTG activities have featured in numerous conferences since, including Jyvaskila in 2011,  Palermo in 2014, Krakow in 2016 and the 1st WCPE in Istanbul in 2012.

The topics covered in these events have embraced teaching at all school levels: primary, lower secondary and upper secondary. The essential difficulty is that energy itself is not understood. We don’t know what it is, but we can usefully describe different forms of it as well as the transformation from on form to another. However, this lack of a clear conceptual basis means that any approach to teaching the subject has the potential to confuse and despite the extensive work of the GTG at past conferences, there is an ongoing need for discussion and reflection on teaching at all levels.

Following the GIREP conference in Slovakia in 2023, a new GTG was proposed which combined the activities of the existing GTG on energy with a new activity embracing the teaching of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is itself a very broad subject which includes a number of concepts challenging both to teach and to understand. At the heart of thermodynamics, however, lies the heat engine, a device for converting heat to work and, vice versa, work to heat. Thermodynamics and energy are therefore inextricably linked through the First Law of thermodynamics, which deals with the conservation of energy in the forms of work and heat. This combined GTG under the joint leadership of David Sands and Yaron Lehavi, is concerned with changes from one form of energy to another and the issues arising during the teaching of such.

Yaron Lehavi (energy) – yaron.lehavi@weizmann.ac.il

David Sands (thermodynamics) – dsandsrb025@gmail.com