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Choose bare, cloth or foam insulation before stepping through minutes.
Keep the Ice Cold
Choose insulation and compare how quickly warm surroundings melt ice.
Grades 3–5 · Physics
Your goal
Use foam insulation at 20 °C for 5 minutes and keep at least 98 g of ice.
Reduced motion is on. The controls still update the scene.
100.0 g of ice remain after 0 minutes. 0.0 g melted after absorbing 0 J from the 20 °C surroundings. Ice and meltwater stay at 0 °C.
°C
Each trial starts with 100 g of ice already at its melting temperature. Energy entering the cup melts 1 g for every 334 J. The room stays warm and supplies that energy. Insulation slows the flow rather than making cold. This simplified cup ignores evaporation and stays partly frozen throughout the available 12 minutes.
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Learn with Keep the Ice Cold
Keep the Ice Cold invites elementary learners to protect a small ice sample from warm surroundings. Select a bare cup, cloth covering or foam insulation, choose the surrounding temperature, and wait one modeled minute at a time. The scene shows how much ice remains and reports the energy absorbed during melting. Compare equal times to separate the effect of insulation from the effect of room temperature. Children can discover that insulation slows incoming heat and that melting ice can absorb energy while staying at the same temperature.
What to look for
Change the surroundings
Try a warmer room and compare how much ice remains after equal times.
Track melting energy
The ice stays at zero degrees while incoming energy changes solid ice into liquid water.
For teachers and curious learners
Explain how insulation slows heat transfer into melting ice. 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.
A 100 g ice sample begins at 0 °C. A fixed warm room supplies heat through an illustrative conductance. Incoming energy melts ice at 334 J/g; evaporation and warming after complete melting are excluded.