Conservation of Energy
Energy is not made or destroyed; it changes form. In a frictionless system, kinetic and gravitational potential trade. With friction, they still trade, and some of the budget leaks into a thermal column. The conservation rule does not change; the bookkeeping does. The traps are small in number, and all of them come from forgetting to write down where the joules went.
Three traps. Substance: students claim friction destroys energy. Procedure: they write $K_i + U_i = K_f + U_f$ even when friction is acting. Representation: their bar chart stops balancing because one of the columns they drew was never an energy at all.
The work
3 ways in · any order
Lesson
Conservation of Energy
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Five sections: frame the conservation rule, define mechanical energy and the thermal column, work two side-by-side examples (one without friction, one with), lay out the three pitfalls, then a ten-scenario applet that drills each trap directly.
Diagnostic
10-item topic check
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Ten items. Each wrong choice is a real misconception on conservation: friction destroys, equation reused despite dissipation, bar-chart bookkeeping errors. The diagnostic finds which one you reach for first, then sends you to a targeted drill.
Targeted Practice
Drill a single misconception
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Pick one of the failure modes you've missed and grind it on its own. The round is adaptive: two correct in a row clears the misconception and you move on.