Energy Story Assignment

This is a fun assignment. Choose one of the processes and stake your claim to it on the board. No more than one person to a process! Then, think about the energy involved in the process: Where does it come from? What form is it in? What form does it take in each step? Where does it go in each step? Sometimes you might want to think about the process, or at least parts of the process, in reverse. Write your story (print or type, please!) on a piece of paper, which you will turn in, possibly after reading it to the class tomorrow morning. You may discuss this project with another student as you work on it, but of course the finished product must be your own work and represent your own understanding.

example:

Maybe one simple process is that I pick up a rock from the floor and put it on the table. At the end of this process, the rock has greater gravitational potential energy than it had. It got that energy from me. I used the chemical energy stored in my body to lift the rock. That energy came from the food I ate, which got most of its energy from radiation from the sun. The rock's kinetic energy at the beginning and the end is zero, but while I was lifting it up, it had some kinetic energy that it got from me. That kinetic energy was mainly converted into gravitational potential energy.

1. You toast a piece of bread in the toaster and then let it sit there for 10 minutes.

2. You use a rubber band to shoot a paper wad, which hits your friend in the face and then falls to the floor.

3. You're driving uphill at a constant speed, when suddenly you run out of gas. Your car slows down, comes to a stop and then rolls down the hill to the bottom, where it crashes into a tree and again comes to a stop.

4. You charge up your batteries, using solar cells, in the sunlight and then use them in your boombox, so you can listen to your favorite CD.

5. You open a can of tennis balls, only to have one of those fake snakes pop out and fly up and across the room, landing on the floor. (Maybe you shouldn't have hit your friend with that paper wad.)

6. You notice that a burning piece of wood has landed on your roof, so, standing on your front lawn, you squirt it with water from your garden hose, until the fire is out.

7. You put water into your freezer. The next morning you take the ice out of the freezer, put it into a cooler, and put a warm can of root beer in there. The root beer gets cold.

8. You fire a bullet at a wooden block that's sitting on the ground. The bullet is embedded in the block, which slides backwards and then comes to a stop.

9.   The space shuttle is launched, orbits the earth for a few days, and then lands safely on earth.

10. A rock climber climbs up North Gateway Rock at Garden of the Gods and then rappels down, landing gently at the bottom of the rock.