I am Umar, a 7th grader at the Dayton Regional STEM School. In this reflection, I will be talking about how I grew in understanding thermal energy. I will use three artifacts as evidence to prove this growth. 

 

My first artifact is NOVA: Making Stuff Colder worksheet. This artifact is from endeavor Science class. Concepts to explain in this artifact are that cold is the absence of heat, heat moves from the hotter object to the colder object, and that it is impossible to reach absolute zero because there will always be small motion. This shows growth because when I first walked into the school, I thought that only objects that feel warm have thermal energy, and now I know that this is not true.

 

My second artifact is my Energy Foldable. This artifact is from Science class. Concepts to explain in this artifact include an explanation for what thermal energy is, and an example of thermal energy that I came up with, and what factors affect it. This shows growth because when I first walked in the door, I would have thought that one of the only examples of thermal energy is a hot cup of tea, lava, etc. Little did I know then that thermal energy could be in snow, or that an example could be molecules vibrating randomly.

 

My third artifact is the answered questions from activity 6.1 from the physical science IQWST book. In this artifact, I displayed what I thought about an example of thermal energy in action before it happened and after it happened. For example, 2 steel balls collide into a paper. Due to so much movement I thought it might burn up and it did. This is an example of what I learned about thermal energy. This shows growth because when I was younger, I thought that if you did the same thing with the 2 steel balls, that it would just mark or bend the paper. Little did I know then that it burn that part of the paper altogether.

 

This will help the future me because I can use this foundation of thermal energy to build upon it, and possibly discover new things to share with the world. I need to further develop this skill by learning more about what it is like, and how things behave when they get really cold. If strange things happen to some objects at colder temperatures, maybe even stranger things happen to other objects at colder temperatures, and I want to find out more about that.