Physics 11 – March 26
The grand-daddy of my problem based learning. I have a very close to real-life situation that I give the students to solve. It involves heat transfer, thermal equilibrium and conservation of energy. It’s challenging but students find it interesting. The problem takes two classes to solve and calculate. I came up with the idea based on some work I used to do when I was a mechanical engineer. It’s a bit ironic that some students think the problem is not realistic when it might be the closest thing to real life that they’ll do all year. The problem is not complex: metal tubes are removed from a high temperature oven and I want to know what this temperature is. Several tubes can be sacrificed to determine their temperature. Direct temperature measurement of the tubes is not possible because they are very small.
