Whole loops
Teaching Guidance
for 14-16
Whole electrical loops and energy stores
This episode takes us beyond ideas of charge and current by focusing on energy in simple electrical loops, with a special focus on the rate at which energy is shifted.
We extend the stores and pathways approach developed in the SPT: Energy topic as we know this provides a consistent framework for qualitative and semi-quantitative descriptions.
Existing approaches to teaching about energy typically involve lots of different kinds
of energy: heat energy, electrical energy, light energy, sound energy and so on. This is rather different from the approach taken in the SPT: Energy topic, where energy
is looked for in different kinds of stores: chemical stores, thermal stores, kinetic stores and so on. Here we think carefully about what is happening in simple electrical loops in terms of this approach to thinking about energy.
