Linking it up

Part of teaching Pinkie Pie is basic school stuff everyone recognizes and most people hate.  We do math workbooks and french workbooks and grind through a lot of the rough stuff as we teach her and her friend.

However, it isn't all grind and solve.  I have been spending a lot of time watching random educational youtube videos trying to find interesting topics to show to the kids.  Sometimes I just show them some cool astronomy thing, but sometimes I manage to tie stuff together in ways that make me feel clever.

The other day I sat them down to watch a video about how life transfers and uses energy.  It talked about ATP and all the systems life has evolved to make use of it, starting from single celled organisms right up to humans.  Then I showed them a video about the Kardashev scale for civilizations, ranking them based on the amount of energy they have access to.  For example, humanity is currently at .75 on the scale, where 1 is using all of the energy that earth has to offer, 2 is using the entire sun, and 3 is the entire galaxy.

The common thread?  The laws of thermodynamics of course!

Body heat is one result of the use of energy by our systems.  This is due, in part at least, to entropy.  You always get waste heat when you transfer energy around.  This waste heat is also an issue if humanity ever achieves type 1 civilization status because we will rapidly boil ourselves to death using that amount of energy on the Earth itself.  Going further than that and building megastructures like Dyson spheres also must account for this problem - dissipating heat is a huge issue when you talk about far future technology like this.

For kids struggling in grade nine science teaching about thermodynamics may be a bit ambitious.  Still, I quite enjoy the challenge of finding disparate subjects that I can link together in some ingenious way, so I take whatever opportunities are available to me.  

The videos typically are only about 10 minutes in length but it usually takes me a solid half hour to get through them.  I constantly stop and check to see if the kids understand the language or concepts being used, and then talk about stuff until they are up to speed.  I don't know if they have noticed that I use youtube as a way to keep them interested in an endless set of mini lectures, but that certainly seems to be what I am doing.  I do like to have graphics and guidance for my teaching, and using videos to give me things to talk about and places to go works well for me.

I don't think I can keep my two pupils on track to learn all the stuff the school expects them to learn.  On the other hand they are going to know a little bit about all kinds of stuff, and there is some merit in that.