A Guided Re-invention Path Towards a More Versatile Concept of Energy Conservation For Secondary School Students

Traditionally the concept of energy conservation is introduced as an undisputable physical law that helps us describe many processes. However the usefulness and the validity of the concept of energy conservation evades many students. We intend to make the concept more useful and less abstract to students. To that end we have them reinvent special cases of energy conservation from practical contextual problems. Thereafter the students are asked to combine those special cases to increase their applicability. By extrapolation of the combination process we hope to lead the students further onwards to the idea that whenever necessary a new term can be added to the conservation law. This implies that the law becomes valid for any situation. If the students realize this they have grasped a very useful and true concept of the energy conservation law. In this paper we describe the final educational design which we developed in three rounds. Furthermore we will discuss the results in terms of students’ conceptual development based on the results in one school.