Teaching and Learning Thermodynamics at school.
Résumé
Teaching thermodynamics begins in primary school, with the first notion of temperature, and continues up to university. Many teaching and learning difficulties have been observed at all levels (Goedhart & Kaper, 2002). Typical examples at the earliest school levels cover changes of state and the difficult differentiation of the concepts of heat, energy and temperature. The problem of attributing a substantive character to heat has also been observed (Watson et al. 1997). Further along, at the university level, giving meaning to the difference between free energy, enthalpy and Gibbs energy is not easy, nor is the introduction of entropy. At such a level, introducing thermodynamics concepts relies primarily on the use of mathematics, for example partial derivatives, which is not possible at school level. How can teaching thermodynamics occur at lower levels?