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Electricity: Choosing a model

Ian Lawrence, Lecturer in Physics Education, School of Education, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK Email: I.Lawrence@bham.ac.uk

This piece presents a way of approaching electricity that was developed as a part of the Institute of Physics SPT 11-14 project.

The core understandings to achieve for electric circuits is that something is moving around once one has a complete circuit (and what is more, a conserved something - no leaks!), and that energy is shifted as a result of this movement.
In what follows, lets keep it simple, considering a circuit containing a lamp and a cell only. The challenge is to develop a manipulable model that emphasises these key ideas and allows children to begin to think about how altering the construction of the circuit (more or different lamps, series of parallel connections, more or fewer cells) is likely to affect the variables with which we describe the circuit ( resistance, voltage, and current; charge and energy). Here are the pertinent elements of a scientifically accurate account. As soon as the circuit is complete, charge starts its steady drift everywhere in the circuit. As soon as the charge starts to move energy is shifted by heating and light in the lamp and energy is shifted from the chemical store in the battery. There is no difference between the state of the charges in the connecting wires. Any model that we use with children should support a development of these statements, rather than setting children off along the wrong tracks by suggesting that what is going on differs from these statements. One physical model of a circuit that fits these criteria has at its core a simple loop of rope. I suggest a loop 2-5 m long made from 4-6 mm diameter soft rope. This rope loop model has the advantage of being immediate and engaging, with people in the place of the circuit elements acting on the rope. In addition two people are needed to act out the circuit.

Teacher acts as cell; select a pupil as the lamp. The rope connects the two. The pupil grips the loop loosely in one hand. Teacher grips the loop at the other end. By pulling the loop around, hand over hand, the teachers chemical store of energy is emptied (you get worn out!) and the pupils hand warms up (make sure it does not glow - rope burns are nasty). A unit of charge is represented by a chunk of rope : all charge starts to move everywhere in the circuit at the same time. The rate at which the charge flows is set both by how hard you pull and by how much the pupil resists. So the current in the circuit - how much charge passes any point in a second depends on both the voltage and on the resistance. Adding another lamp to the circuit is easy to do - just drag the rope through a second hand. This will reduce the flow rate. And altering the comparative resistance of the lamps is easy - one pupil grips the rope harder than the other. And it does not matter which way round the rope flows - still the pupil providing the larger resistance gets the warmer hand. So one can be agnostic about the sign of the charges in wires and confront the common misapprehension that the first lamp is always the brightest - there is no first if running the rope either way produces exactly the same effect. In these ways, and others, the rope model can also be used to create expectations, based on immediate experiences, with the model about how electric circuits with series connections might behave. That these expectations can be confirmed by the real behaviour of lamps and bulbs is a key ingredient in the belief that electricity is a topic which can makes sense. This must surely be a key aim in introductory studies. That is why the choice of teaching tools is crucial. One must choose respecting both the science for the children to learn and what is known about how children learn. This is hard work and develops professional expertise.