Real Life Application: Thermal Conductivity has awesome real-life applications. Students see their parents have different types of pots and pans. When a pan has metal handles they know that they get hot and when a pan has plastic handles they do not. They have known this for years, but now you can talk about how different metals used for different cookware will actual conduct heat in different ways. Is Emeril’s cookware different than Wolfgang’s? You can actually look at what metals they are made of and talk about their properties.