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...

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...

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 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...

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.

This lesson develops the concept of finding areas of sectors. In particular students will:

• Find perimeters, areas, and arc lengths of sectors using formulas
• Find the relationships between arc lengths, and areas of sectors after scaling
• Using radians

The initial challenge...

In this Core Maths resource students are asked to apply their knowledge of upper and lower bounds when designing a car park for a department store. 

The teacher's notes suggest possible extensions, such as comparing with a real car park or finding possible profit if their design...

These two Future Morph resources aim to show students that there is a wide choice of options open to those who study sciences and mathematics. The resources consist of:

Career examples list

The list covers six...

The Careers in Space workshop included inputs from: * Vicki Hodges on Astrium's STEM Ambassadors programme * Rosalind Azouzi on Space Tourism and the Next Generation * Lloyd Marshall on Apprenticeship opportunities with Astrium

This resource, from the Royal Institution, provides students with the opportunity to explore the formation of a parabola through a paper folding activity. Students follow a set of simple instructions which describe how to fold a piece of A4 paper and are asked to describe what shape is produced. The activity is...

There are two parts to the DIY Dendrometer resources: 

Part A focusses on how trees grow and their role within both the carbon cycle and the water cycle. Learners are encouraged to take part in a citizen science project which involves creating and installing a DIY...

Activities in this resource aim to:

• celebrate the achievement of completing the Human Genome project in 2003
• show the relevance of genome sequencing today
• explain the methods used for DNA sequencing, including the illumina method of rapid sequencing and the shotgun sequencing
...

Using a spreadsheet as a grid of 'pixels', this computing activity teachers how 1's and 0's can store image data. The classroom exercises use images with increasing pixel resolution, looking at how this affects the clarity of the image. Moving from black-and-white images, the students then use grids of colour...