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These resources have been reviewed and selected by STEM Learning’s team of education specialists for factual accuracy and relevance to teaching STEM subjects in UK schools.

Car of the Future

Many different personal attributes can impact on road safety including a person's vision, ability to concentrate, reaction times and mobility. The car of the future should be designed to help people overcome these issues.

In this activity students design investigations to test reaction times and ability to concentrate when distracted. They then try their test on older people and use their results to design a car of the future.

Having carried out their investigation, students consider how valid they think their conclusions are and why (small sample size, methods might not have been reproducible, relatively young age of people tested at home). Finally, students watch the video The future of car safety in which scientists and engineers working in this field discuss their work and the importance of STEM subjects to what they do, before peer assessing their designs by using the handout Design assessment.

Other lessons and resources for this theme can be found in the Energy and Transport collection.

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