The Birmingham Institute for Forest Research (BIFoR) is home to the BIFoR FACE facility, one of the world's largest climate change experiments where 150 parts per million extra of carbon dioxide is added to areas of the oak forest, to predict the impact on the ecosystem 50 years into the future.

BIFoR has...

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...

Two translucent liquids are mixed. At first, nothing happens: the resulting solution is still translucent. Suddenly, with no warning, the solution turns blue-black all at once.

Curriculum links include redox reactions, rate of reaction, kinetics

In this activity students investigate the mystery of a light beam which seems to bend.  Students can investigate:

• Qualitative behaviour of light  when the medium in which it propagates changes its refraction index. 
• Quantitative evaluation of the behaviour of light in refraction by means of...

These activities allow students to model how environmental scientists compare diversity in different ecosystems by using ordinary playing cards as ‘species’ to generate data to calculate Simpson’s Diversity Index. This can be completed in a single lesson. Some students find the concept of species diversity quite...

Empower your learners to consider the causes, effects and solutions of key issues surrounding climate change using this series of lessons.

There are two parts to the Future forest resources. During part A, learners will work together to create a ‘solution tree’ that can be...

Gelli Baff, a crystalline powder, has been dumped into a bathtub filled with water. How can you force the hydrogel to go down the plughole in order to drain the bathtub? 

In this investigation, students learn about swelling reactions, balanced reactions, and polymerisation. Students should be able to...

In this resource students are challenged to answer a mystery about colour.   They investigate the additive and subtractive synthesis of coloured pigments and explore what coloured objects look like under different coloured lights.
 

This mystery can be used to introduce osmosis and diffusion. 

Two beakers are displayed at the front of the room. Both look identical in that they both contain a plastic zip--lock bag with a starch solution inside. The zip-lock bags are both sitting in a clear solution. What the students don’t know is that...

The mystery revolves round a detective story which the students gradually solve. A jeweller has been murdered: the suspects are his metal suppliers but the motive and the culprit are initially unknown.

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This activity booklet uses the real life context of air traffic control using radar signals to identify the position of an aeroplane that students act out. It provides them with an opportunity to use their knowledge of waves and speed = distance / time to calibrate and calculate the distance a plane is from the...

The mystery ...

Students research, and then try out, ways of detecting analgesic compounds in mixtures:

• Chemical tests for particular organic functional groups.

• Paper and/or thin-layer chromatography to separate and identify analgesic...