Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Peer instruction: entropy

These slides show questions I used when teaching entropy using peer instruction. The slides are in Danish, but I hope you get the idea and there is always Google translate. Any questions, just leave a comment.

The slides refer to two Molecular Workbench simulations, which you can access here and here, and read more about here and here.

Specific comments to the slides
Slides 1-5: Here I start the simulation without removing the separator.  Then pose the question, two rounds of votes (usually not needed for the first simulation with 100 particles, as more than 80 % submit the correct answer), then remove the separator and explain.

Slides 10-15: Here I run the first simulation (small volume, low temperature) and carefully explain what the recorded times mean and how they correlate with probability.  Then I pose the first question (slide 10), two rounds of votes, then run the double volume simulation, then summarize the right answer (slide 11), and explain it (slide 12).  Same process for doubling the temperature.

See all posts related to peer instruction here.

Related blog posts
Illustrating entropy
Entropy, volume, and temperature
Simulations in teaching physical chemistry: thermodynamics and statistical mechanics

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