Exploring energy and equilibrium through simple experiments Authors Klemens Koch Didactics of chemistry, Pedagogical University Berne and Gymnasium BielSeeland DOI: 10.2436/20.2003.02.251 Keywords: experiments, energy, heat and work, collision theory, catalysis, chemical equilibrium Abstract Energy moves us and entropy determines the direction, e.g. of chemical equilibria. They are behind chemistry, they accompany us through chemistry lessons and many everyday problems, such as the climate debate. This article aims to get to the bottom of the energy concepts in chemistry and their application in chemistry teaching by looking at about a dozen phenomena in ten experiments. The role of entropy is only touched on in passing; dealing with it explicitly would be a topic in itself. Author Biography Klemens Koch, Didactics of chemistry, Pedagogical University Berne and Gymnasium BielSeeland Didactics of chemistry, Fabrikstrasse 8, Sekundarstufe II, PH Bern, 3012 Bern, Switzerland, klemens.koch@phbern.ch, https://www.phbern.ch/ueber-die-phbern/personen/klemenskoch) and chemistry teacher at the Gymnasium Biel-Seeland, Switzerland.Research field: Experiments and didactics for an extended understanding of the everyday world, e.g. in introductory chemistry, redox chemistry, thermodynamics and quantum chemistry. Downloads PDF Published 2024-03-06 Issue No. 32 (2023) Section Treball experimental License The intellectual property of articles belongs to the respective authors.On submitting articles for publication to the journal Educació Química, authors accept the following terms:Authors assign to Societat Catalana de Química (a subsidiary of Institut d’Estudis Catalans) the rights of reproduction, communication to the public and distribution of the articles submitted for publication to Educació Química.Authors answer to Societat Catalana de Química for the authorship and originality of submitted articles.Authors are responsible for obtaining permission for the reproduction of all graphic material included in articles.Societat Catalana de Química declines all liability for the possible infringement of intellectual property rights by authors.The contents published in the journal, unless otherwise stated in the text or in the graphic material, are subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (by-nc-nd) 3.0 Spain licence, the complete text of which may be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/deed.en. Consequently, the general public is authorised to reproduce, distribute and communicate the work, provided that its authorship and the body publishing it are acknowledged, and that no commercial use and no derivative works are made of it.Educació Química is not responsible for the ideas and opinions expressed by the authors of the published articles.