November 28th, 2010 Working On Bar Charts

On Wednesday in class, we continued working on our real-life situation money, energy, and food bar chart packets. For each of the questions in the packets we had to come up with a bar chart that shows the initial state, a process, and a final state. These bar charts helped us to see what was going on over time and to compare initial and final states of the situation.

In my case, Yolanda, Yuji, Katie, and I were working on the energy packet. So our first question had to do with a girl on an elevator. She was on the bottom floor, she stepped inside the elevator and went up to the fourth floor. For this question my group had to draw a bar chart that had the initial energy, the process/work, and the final state. So our initial state was the energy that the elevator had on the bottom floor, which was zero jewels. Our process/work was the elevator going upwards. This involved an increase in both kinetic and gravitational potential energy. For the final states we had to include the increase in both types of energy. That's all there is to a bar chart.

The one area that I got tripped up on is the process portion of the chart. After working through the packet, I realized that the process is really just the work being done. Also, you don't have to include all of the types of energy, just the type that you're using because I included every type of energy we learned about when I only needed 2.

KS