Follow the temperatures
Step the transfer and watch the warm block cool while the cool block warms.
Heat Conduction Race
Compare how copper, glass and wood transfer heat between two blocks.
Grades 3–5 · Physics
Your goal
Use copper to bring the cool block to at least 35 °C within 20 steps.
Reduced motion is on. The controls still update the scene.
After 0 equal time steps, hot block 100.0 °C and cool block 20.0 °C. Heat flows from hot to cool. Their temperature sum stays 120 °C because their heat capacities are equal.
Changing material starts a fresh race at 100 °C and 20 °C. This two-block model treats each block as evenly warm. Each step transfers a finite amount of energy through the connector. It compares rates rather than real material dimensions or measured seconds. No energy enters or leaves the pair.
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Learn with Heat Conduction Race
Heat Conduction Race helps elementary students compare how materials carry thermal energy. Choose copper, glass or wood to join a hot block and a cool block, then advance the experiment one equal time step at a time. Read both temperatures and predict which material will warm the cool block fastest. Every new material starts the same fair comparison. Guided goals encourage children to notice that the blocks approach the same temperature while their combined thermal energy stays constant in this isolated, equal-capacity model.
What to look for
Compare materials
Changing the joining material starts both blocks at the same temperatures for a fair comparison.
Check the total
The temperature sum stays fixed because the isolated blocks have equal heat capacities.
For teachers and curious learners
Discover that heat flows from warmer objects to cooler objects at different rates. Ask students to predict what will happen, change one setting, and explain what they observe. Learn gives a starting point. Practice and Challenge offer new goals with the same scene.
Two uniformly warm blocks with equal heat capacities exchange a bounded fraction of their temperature difference per illustrative time step. The connector has no stored heat and the pair loses no energy.