Conduction is the way something passes along through a material. In school it almost always means heat moving through metal, or electricity moving through a wire. You heat one end of a pan; later the handle gets hot too — that is heat conduction. You plug in a lamp; the current runs through the copper — that is electrical conduction. The dictionary also allows water moving through pipes, because the old Latin idea was “leading something along.” Though actually, scientists today usually keep conduction for heat and electricity, and talk about water flowing in pipes. Two sister ideas in the same science chapter are convection (heat moving because the air or water itself moves) and radiation (heat travelling as rays, like from the sun). Conduction is the still-material one.