The new national curriculum

Note: this section is under construction. The list of questions are shown, but there are no links to the pages showing the answers which are currently being completed.

The 2014 curriculum for England introduces some new ideas about energy, which imply that teachers should adapt their approaches to the topic.

• Is the new curriculum better or just different from previous versions? What are the opportunities and where are the pitfalls?
• Why is ‘energy values of different foods’ included under ‘Physics’ and not ‘Biology’? Is this a good place to start?
• Why has the term ‘internal energy’ been introduced? What exactly does it mean?
• What are the implications of ‘comparing the starting with the final conditions of a system’?
• Why have references to dissipation been dropped? Does this make the energy concept easier for students to understand?