Today as my mom and I were baking cookies to eat during the Super Bowl, I realized that our oven is a great representation of Physics concepts. A convection oven heats and cooks by convection which is heating through a fluid medium by movement of fluid. In an oven the heat that comes off of the coils rises and the surrounding heat sinks. This motion repeats and eventually cooks whatever is in the oven.
Also, the top of the oven shows the concepts of resistance and power. The coils that you place pans and pots on while cooking heat up due to electric current. The power that goes into the stove is equal to the current times the voltage. The coils then heat up due to this power. The heat that eventually comes off of the coils to heat up the food is equal to the current squared times the resistance of the coils. As the coils heat up, the resistance increases as shown in the equation P=I^2R. This heat is transfered to the food by conduction and as a side effect of the increase in temperature of the coils the resistance increases.
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