My Brilliant Friend Lesson Plan

Thermal Shock Demo

Kind of Activity:

Group Work

Objective:

Students will view an experiment on thermal shock to help them better understand what happened to Lila's copper pot

Common Core Standards:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.2

Structure:

In the letter Lila writes to Elena, she talks about a copper pot exploding in her kitchen. There seems to be no rhyme nor reason to why this happened, but this is actually a phenomenon called thermal shock. Thermal shock occurs when a material is unevenly heated and so tension occurs within the material, sometimes causing it to break. The following website provides good basic information about thermal shock: ...