A Catalyst article about buckytubes, a type of carbon nanoparticle.The allotropes of carbon —diamond, graphite and buckminsterfullerene (bucky balls) — are well known. Now scientists are working on buckytubes. These are based on elongated tubes formed from sheets of hexagonally-linked carbon atoms, capped at both...

Groups of students from Townley Grammar School for Girls took part in RHS Wisley’s Budding Gardeners' Wonderland’ Competition 2015, with the assistance of two STEM Ambassadors – an RHS landscape designer and a landscape architect. The brief was similar to an enterprise project – to create a competition standard 1mx...

In this Core Maths task students are asked to create a budget plan for a mobile phone company covering the manufacturing, marketing and staffing costs. You may also want to see the Budgeting and foreign exchange Core Maths resource. 

Budgeting:  Lesson...

This Core Maths resource contains teachers' notes, lesson plan and student handouts that explore budgeting and foreign exchange. The two topics can be combined into one large project or taught as two discrete tasks. 

There is a Powerpoint presentation of the tasks for classroom use, including possible...

Carom Maths provides this resource for teachers and students of A Level mathematics. This presentation introduces an explanation and a simulation of Buffon's Needles experiment, that yields an approximation for π, before developing the experiment further by asking what would happen if the shape of the needles were...

A set of simple scratch ‘debugging’ activities that children can use to apply their understanding of programs and codes.  Children are shown a series of faulty programs which are based around the water cycle.  They are then supported to use logical reasoning to locate and fix the bugs within them.  Notes for...

Carry out a survey on how many bugs are found in a certain area and add to a national survey. This resource fits in with the curriculum topics of animals in the local environment, habitats, and interdependence and adaptation.

There are six key species to watch out for: Two-spot Ladybird, Devil’s Coach Horse...

This resource, produced by SEPNet and Queen Mary University of London, uses Lego to represent the building blocks of matter. Different colour Lego bricks are assigned to different quarks and leptons. The quarks can be put together to make hadrons, such as protons and neutrons. The blocks can also be used to show...

This is a classroom-based activity from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute that allows students to explore the features of two bacterial pathogen genomes. The aim of this activity is to highlight the role of different genetic components in two closely related subspecies of Salmonella enterica, and to identify how...

Many structures are built around frameworks made of straight, rigid pieces of wood or metal, called members, connected together. Forces generated in the members support the structure. In this activity, drinking straws are used as members, to make a self-supporting dome.

Learning outcomes:

• ...

This resource focusses on exploring shape, nets, wheels and axles. This activity uses pupil’s prior knowledge of nets to make a base for a vehicle. It then introduces the use of axles and wheels to enable the car to move. It could be used at key stage 1 to develop understanding of the use of axles and wheels in...

In this resource, students will use the theme of football on the Moon to learn how electronic intercom circuits can help players communicate. Students will gain an understanding of how sound waves travel and are received to allow them to be heard in the ear. Building on students pre-existing knowledge of circuits...

In this activity students design and model a robot arm in 2D, need to be able to name the main parts of a robot arm and to be able to design and make a 2D card model of a 3D product. Robot arms are an example of a programmable system. They are used in a wide variety of industrial applications, ranging from loading...