This unplugged activity from Peter McOwan and Paul Curzon mingles computer science with biology. A group activity is used that mimics the firing of neurons within the brain. These trigger other neurons to fire – these can be compared to AND gates in logic circuits.

The ‘brain in a bag’ kits used in the...

Breaking the Mould? was commissioned by the Nuffield Foundation with the aim of evaluating the teaching and learning of the AS course in Science for Public Understanding, giving insight into other 'new' science courses.

A good brief is the foundation for the success of any building project. The objective of the ongoing brief-making ...

In this module students will study barnacle morphology, life histories and life styles as Darwin did. He based his classification and search for a common ancestor upon his studies. Recent work using genetic and molecular evidence and scanning electron microscopy shows how some of the key difficulties in drawing the...

The Youth Grand Challenges is a new STEM competition that aims to inspire students aged 11-to-19.  This resource provides a selection of ideas for research or practical projects on the subect of the spread of disease.

Curriculum links include pathogens, bacteria, epidemics, pandemics, malaria, water borne...

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...

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...

In this project students learn to build a robot buggy using a Raspberry Pi. It contains detailed tutorials that cover:

• How to setup a motor controller board with two motors
• How to control motors using Python
• How to build a robot chassis

These activities are aimed at ...

This series of Core Maths activities involves mortgage finance, interest rates, income tax, national insurance, scheduling, Gantt diagrams and estimation. The tasks can form a large project or be used as stand-alone lessons.

Build or Buy: Teacher Guidance
The teacher guidance package...

This study details the development of a new foundation degree at London South Bank University in electrical engineering, in collaboration with EDF Energy, which was aimed at addressing the lack of technically trained engineers. Content and delivery of the course was...

In this activity, students create colour images from satellite data. This allows them to study how different surfaces reflect different wavelengths of light, how coloured images are created using an RGB model, and how band combinations can be chosen to examine a particular landscape effectively.

Building Incubators, from the Centre for Science Education, is a set of teaching materials which offer a cross-curricular approach to learning about bioengineering and the survival of premature babies. The context is designing a temperature-regulated environment to help...

[b]Ordering units of weight:[/b] the objective of this activity is to assess prior knowledge of learners and their understanding of metric units. Students are presented with a set of cards on which are written metric weights in grams, kilograms and in words. Students are required to place the cards in order of...

Learners discover the BIFoR FACE (Birmingham Institute for forest research free air carbon enrichment) experiment and the infrastructure associated with it. They are introduced to the arrays, met masts and flux tower and encouraged to think about the research questions that this experiment can answer. Learners are...