Three ways heat travels

Hold a metal spoon in hot tea and its end slowly warms; hold your hand above a fire and it warms. Heat moving from one place to another is heat transfer.

Heat moves from a hotter place to a cooler one. The heat energy of an object is really the kinetic energy of its randomly moving particles — their translational, rotational or vibrational motion — and heat transfer is that kinetic energy spreading from where the particles move faster to where they move slower.