Is Ohm's law taught in primary school in your country?

[krumpol]

Yes, as a part of electro-magnetic effects subject field, eight grade of elementary schools (ISCED2) in Slovakia.

 

[Sal1950]

I don't remember when or if I learned Ohm's in school?
But I do remember building a big sparky tesla coil as a science project in the 7th grade.
Won 1st Place in the contest too.

 

[JSmith]

Primary definitely not... high school, first year for me, but that was because my science teacher could see I was bored with the level we were learning at so used to give me text books from 2/3 years ahead as I always had more questions they weren't able to explore in full during class. Things have changed a lot since my time (long ago) in the education system.

JSmith

 

[xaviescacs]

Yeah, it should have a second volt gnome pulling on the right side to show the circuit, maybe. I'm an ME and not the OP but an 8 year old should be able to get the concept with that cartoon.

It's fine. The main objection one can make is about direction of both I and V and related to this about what the Intensity dwarf represents.

This direction issue is a bit tricky because electrons are negatively charged, so the Lorentz force will have the opposite direction with respect to the field E, or the one that goes from low potential to high potential. So the current J actually represents the change in positive charge, or holes, which move in the same direction as the field.

The Ohm's law is a scalar one and representing the Intensity as something that goes from one place to another it's a bit of an overstatement, so to speak, going a bit beyond than the equation itself expresses. It's very natural of course, as we know something is really going from one place to another, roughly speaking.

To solve or design a circuit, AFAIK, we don't care about direction of current and even less about the charge carriers (as long as polarity is right xD), and hence is not an issue for a young student either, so the potential confusion the drawing may introduce is well under control if some context is provided to the student, IMHO.

About the direction again, something similar can be said about V, which has an implicit direction if we understand we have to subtract the lower potential from the higher one, which suggests a direction, namely from negative to positive. I guess we can say that the drawing is representing the field E rather than the potential V then. Spending some time talking about this with the learners is quite important when teaching this subject IMHO, because these notions of potential, potential difference and potential gradient are cornerstones in EM and physics in general. In fact, if I were teaching or writing about this again, I would use the term gradient without hesitation regardless of the level and invest some days explaining the concept intuitively, perhaps with some exercises of drawing the gradients given some potentials.

 

[egellings]

No science or engineering of any kind was taught in my midwest USA elementary school.

 

[kschmit2]

7th grade in Germany