Heating water: volume and heat transfer

1. Pick how much water goes in the beaker with the mL buttons under the beaker. The hot plate stays on the same setting every time.
2. Press Turn on the hot plate. Watch the thermometer and the temperature graph rise together.
3. Use How fast to run the 4 minutes to watch in real time or speed it up.
4. The data table gets a new column for each volume. It shows the temperature every 0.5 minutes, just like Table 1 in your lab.
5. Run 100 mL, 150 mL and 200 mL. Copy each column into the data table on your self-check.
6. Check the rate of heat transfer graph to compare the volumes. Each dot is one run.
7. Doing the lab with a real hot plate? Use the stopwatch above the data table. Leave Beep every 30 s on, and read the thermometer at each beep.
8. Press Reset to run the same volume again, or Clear all runs to start over.

Thermal energy is the energy of moving particles. When people say "heat," scientists usually mean thermal energy.

Temperature tells how fast the particles are moving on average. A thermometer measures it in degrees Celsius (°C).

Heat transfer is thermal energy moving from a hotter object to a cooler one. Here it moves from the hot plate (the source) into the beaker and the water (the receivers).

The rate of heat transfer tells how fast the temperature changes. Find it like the slope of a line:

rate = (final temp − starting temp) ÷ (final time − starting time)

Example: water goes from 20 °C to 40 °C in 4 minutes. The change is 20 °C. So the rate is 20 ÷ 4 = 5 °C/min.

In a fair test you change only one thing (the independent variable). Here that is the volume of water. Everything else stays the same.