Energy and its carriers

Reports on the first course of a new physics curriculum developed at the Karlsruhe Institute for the Didactics of Physics (Falk and Herrmann 1977, 1978, 1979, 1981). The entire curriculum begins at the elementary school level with children aged 10-12 and is intended to extend beyond high school and through university studies (Falk and Ruppel 1975, 1976). Energy is introduced as the primary quantity at the very beginning of the course. It is not 'derived' from other seemingly more fundamental quantities such as mass, displacement, velocity and force. However, the course is not an ad hoc construction simply to explain the concept of energy. The essential features of many natural and technological processes can be understood by considering the flow of energy. This is the basic idea underlying the course, and can be restated more completely in terms of the following rule: 'something is happening whenever energy is flowing and a flow of energy is always accompanied by the flow of at least one other substance-like quantity'. The course strategy is designed to make this simple rule obvious by way of numerous examples taken from everyday life. Selected topics are highlighted and they introduce concepts unique to the authors approach. These concepts are presented in the same chronological order as they appear in the course.