This booklet is part of the ‘Innovations in Practical Work’ series published by the Gatsby Science Enhancement Programme (SEP). Thermocolour film is a fascinating material that changes colour depending on the temperature. It allows a very wide range of phenomena to be...

This Core Maths resource is a precursor to the linked tasks of Due dates, Baby boom and Chicken and egg, on the Normal distribution....

This activity from the Nuffield Foundation introduces the use of moving averages and weighted moving averages to smooth out seasonal fluctuations in UK house prices, enabling the yearly trend to be identified. The data provided is adapted from The Halifax House Price Index spreadsheet and although the arithmetic...

How big?
This resource uses scale models to understand the huge differences between the Sun and other stars in the galaxy. The spreadsheet gives scales for the Sun and five...

One of the units from the Nuffield Primary Solutions in Design and Technology. Children design and make a healthy cold drink for another class member.

Each child will have to find out the preferences and needs of the consumer and will include feedback from that person as part of the evaluation process

One of the units from the Nuffield Primary Solutions in Design and Technology. Children design and make a carrier that meets the needs of a person who has to carry particular items.

The aim is to develop a carrier...

One of the units from the Nuffield Primary Solutions in Design and Technology. In this unit, students write a specification for toast that meets the identified preferences of a particular person. They then make a serving of toast to that specification. The task can be widened to include the development of a...

One of the units from the Nuffield Primary Solutions in Design and Technology. Children research a person's preferences for a hot drink and fulfill those preferences by serving a drink that meets the specification.

...

In this activity, seeds are grown in Petri dishes so children can make direct observations of the roots as they grow. The activity requires measurements over a number of days, so provides an opportunity to link to numeracy by working out growth rate and representing...

One of the units from the Nuffield Primary Solutions in Design and Technology. Children design and make a controllable, battery-powered toy vehicle using card, wood, found materials, mechanical and electrical components.

The toy created can be based on an actual vehicle, on a vehicle from a book or film, or...

This activity is designed to get students thinking about plants as living organisms that have to survive, reproduce and defend themselves against disease. Students begin by cataloguing the health of trees in the area, and can then follow this with a statistical investigation, as suitable for your location and the...

This field study resource pack encourages students to act as environmental scientists to assess the ‘health’ of a heathland habitat. The resource contains three separate activities that students can complete, depending on the time available and suitability of the site:
• Measuring nitrogen pollution in the...

This practical activity uses a simple and convenient model of the real environment in order to demonstrate the principles of random sampling and how to estimate biodiversity. Students use different coloured sugar balls to represent different species in order to put Simpson's Diversity Index to the test, which takes...