Faraday Challenges are designed to promote team work, curiosity and raise the profile of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects, so are particularly relevant as part of an enrichment and enhancement programme built into your curriculum.

This guide, from triple science support,...

This video introduces permanent magnets, their fields and how to investigate them using iron filings. It also demonstrates the field between attracting and repelling magnets. 

By using a helical spring and varying the mass on the end of it, students can time the period of oscillation to calculate the acceleration due to gravity.  This can be done by plotting the extension (e) by the time period squared (T²).  This would be good to use computer software to assist with this....

By using a constant head apparatus or similar you will investigate the shape of a water path projected through the gravitational field of the Earth to find the acceleration due to gravity. This would benefit from using slo-mo filming or photography, or even to introduce students to a travelling microscope.

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This investigation uses a linear air track that is tilted to a slope to calculate the acceleration of an object due to gravity.  SUVAT can be used to calculate this value, and datalogging, especially using light gates can be used. Students can also use a protractor to measure angles which can be varied.

This...

From Nelson Thornes, this resource helps students studying physics at post-16, A2 level. They help students to learn how the mass of cosmological objects are measured. Examples include the Earth, the Sun and finally the super-massive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. Some of these measurements were made...

Produced by the Royal Observatory Greenwich, this booklet shows how to use Kepler’s third law to calculate the mass of the black hole in the centre of the Milky Way. Included is an online video that discusses what is inside a black hole. Equations and physical terms are introduced and discussed. Students are tasked...

This resource presents some real seismic data recorded before a volcanic eruption and allows students to locate some of the resulting earthquakes by use of graphs and maps.

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This video demonstrates how compressing a gas increases its temperature. A small piece of cotton wool is placed into the bottom of a narrow plastic tube. When the air is rapidly compressed by a piston, the air temperature increases and the cotton ignites. The 'fire piston' can be used to illustrates the transfer of...

This video demonstrates how adiabatic compression of air can produce enough heat to ignite cotton wool.  The auto-ignition temperature of cotton wool is approximately 400⁰C.  The video could be used to explain the way diesel engines work.

This resource, produced by SEPNet and Queen Mary University of London, uses Lego to represent the building blocks of matter. Different colour and size Lego bricks are assigned to protons, neutrons and electrons. Fusion is shown by joining bricks together and fission by breaking large collections of bricks apart....

These diagnostic questions and response activities (contained in the zip file) support students in being able to:

• Identify objects that are floating.
• Describe how the mass and volume of an object affect how well it floats.  
• Describe how the shape of an object affects how well it...

In this lesson, students devise their own flood warning device and create a technical brief for an international audience using recognised circuit symbols. They also consider how people both here and in Nepal can best prepare for floods. Heavy monsoon rains can devastate communities in Nepal. The severe flooding...