How can containers keep stuff from warming up or cooling down?
This physical science unit develops science ideas about temperature, heat, and thermal energy. Students build from prior learning about states of matter, energy, and energy transfer from 3-5th grade science. For example, water is made of matter, which can be a solid, a liquid, or a gas. In science, we represent matter, like water, as “too small to see” objects called particles. Finally, we recognize that when objects are at different temperatures they can change state, (e.g. ice melting or water freezing). Students examine these ideas first with a familiar but puzzling phenomenon: two iced drinks in two different kinds of cups.
This unit encourages students to wonder how a regular, single-wall plastic cup is different from a special, double-wall plastic cup. Students observe that the drink in the regular cup warms up faster than the drink in the special cup. This makes students wonder about how features of the cup (i.e. the material, the lid, the straw) causes stuff to get warmer faster or keeps drinks from warming. Students are encouraged to draw a model to help explain the difference in warming rates. These models inspire students to think of other fancy cups or containers and how they are similar and different (e.g., metal vacuum sealed cups, styrofoam cups). Finally, students pose their own questions about the cup features, the air and light around the cups, and how they relate to keeping substances hot or cold longer.
Later in the unit, students engage in engineering and design thinking. They apply different science ideas to develop, test, and iterate on a cup design challenge. They try to design a cup to compete against the special cup from the start of the unit.