In this DIY Faraday Challenge, students are asked to work in teams to design and construct the rocket which will transport supplies via Earth orbit to the astronauts on Mars. They are also required to build a system to transport the rocket to the...

This collection of practical activities, investigations and games is all based on current lunar research. It supports many aspects of working scientifically and links to area of the curriculum including: earth and space, light and shadows, forces, materials, changes of state and rocks and soils. Activities are...

In this activity students adopt the role of a small team of undercover environmentalists, deep in a tropical rainforest, on a mission to investigate and expose the illegal activities being carried out by a multinational logging organisation that is destroying the planet.

Rainforest involves four lessons:...

This booklet is part of the ‘Innovations in Practical Work’ series published by the Gatsby Science Enhancement Programme (SEP). Visible light is the region of the electromagnetic spectrum with which we are most familiar. We are able to distinguish between different...

Students are presented with two mobile phone tariffs and have to explore at what point one tariff becomes better value than the other. They have to select a way of comparing the tariffs using appropriate graphs or tables, work systematically to explore the effects of changing the amount of time the phone is in use...

In this activity, students investigate the potential effects to health of the use of mobile phones and their transmitters, which use radio waves and microwaves to transmit information. Research can include the electromagnetic spectrum and its applications and how energy...

Microwaves are a form of electromagnetic radiation and they penetrate into human tissue. There is still a significant debate about the safety of holding even a low power microwave transmitter next to your brain or keeping it in a trouser pocket. The possibility of...

This Science upd8 resource examines what proof there is that mobile telephones are harmful. Policy makers usually follow the precautionary principle. They issue warnings at the first hint of danger. Should we take their advice? In this discussion activity, students judge the risks and the strength of the evidence...

Produced by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, in this activity students have to use their observational skills to identify and record the difference (phenotypic change) between two images, one wild type zebra fish and one mutant zebra fish.

To aid in their diagnosis of the phenotypic change, a glossary...

This resource from the IET Faraday programme, supported by MEI and Tomorrow's Engineers, invites students to model the journey of a toy boat crossing a river which has a current of 3m/s.

"Two friends are on opposite banks of a river which is 30m wide. One of them has a model boat...

In this activity from the Nuffield Foundation, students match descriptions of a variety of real scenarios involving motion with the corresponding velocity–time and displacement–time graphs. Several issues will be discussed while completing this task and students will also have to consider how realistic or...

This problem solving resource uses linear functions to model real world data about car skid marks. The work assumes students are familiar with substitution and drawing straight line graphs.

The problem is set in the context of investigating car accidents. When a car suddenly brakes to a stop, it can leave...

This booklet is part of the ‘Innovations in Practical Work’ series published by the Gatsby Science Enhancement Programme (SEP) and produced in partnership with the Walker Institute for Climate System Research. Climate scientists do not have a ‘climate in a test tube’ to try out their ideas, so to understand the...

From Teachers TV Lesson Planning Pack series, this video shows an example of how a lesson can introduce children to the idea of light travelling in a straight line. Rachel Dixon, a Year Six teacher at Ripple Primary School in Barking, presents her lesson on light. She aims to get her children to understand that...

This resource from the Nuffield Foundation provides the opportunity for students to fit functions to linear and quadratic graphs. It is assumed that students will already have some knowledge of linear and quadratic functions and their graphs, which are used to compare models and comment on their suitability. A...