Activities
These lecture notes for the first week of https://paradigms.oregonstate.edu/courses/ph441 include a couple of small group activities in which students work with the Gibbs formulation of the entropy.
These lecture notes from the ninth week of https://paradigms.oregonstate.edu/courses/ph441 cover phase transformations, the Clausius-Clapeyron relation, mean field theory and more. They include a number of small group activities.
Students calculate two different (thermodynamic) partial derivatives of the form \(\left(\frac{\partial A}{\partial B}\right)_C\) from information given on the same contour map.
This small group activity is designed to provide practice with the multivariable chain rule. Students determine a particular rate of change using given information involving other rates of change. The discussion emphasizes the equivalence of a variety of approaches, including the use of differentials. Good “review” problem; can also be used as a homework problem.