For our first session in the series, we focused on energy. We began the session by realizing that energy is all around us - from chemical energy in chocolate to electromagnetic energy in light. We honed in on mechanical energy - gravitational potential energy and kinetic energy. We used a PhET simulation of a skateboarder to identify how speed, mass, and height affect mechanical energy, and conceptually derived the formulas for potential and kinetic energies. We then applied these formulas to the conservation of energy equation to practice figuring out a missing variable, such as height or velocity. Lastly, we used the skills we learned to predict the relative amounts of potential and kinetic energies at different points in the skateboarder’s path.

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