From the Integrating Mathematical Problem Solving project by Mathematics in Education and Industry (MEI), this activity for post-16 students demonstrates that the acidity of a solution depends on the number of hydrogen ions per litre; the number of hydrogen ions per litre varies so much that a logarithmic scale is...

In this activity from the Nuffield Foundation students use the Chinese postman algorithm, also called the Route Inspection Problem, to solve practical problems. The College Open Day problem provides an introduction to the concept, and asks students to investigate the minimum distance someone would have to travel to...

In this resource students are required to use moving averages to investigate evidence for trends in local temperature change. There are links to the very real political and scientific debates regarding the question of climate change.

Climate Change Overview This brief overview makes...

The Nuffield Foundation provides this activity which students use to create spreadsheets that model what would happen to the temperature of the Earth if there were to be a sudden change in the amount of radiation entering or leaving the planet. Students then investigate polynomial and exponential functions to find...

The Nuffield Foundation provides this resource which shows students how, given a set of measurements along an irregular coastline, it is possible to approximate the area of land which is lost to coastal erosion over a period of time. Coastal erosion A - this activity uses the context of coastal erosion to introduce...

This unit of work enables students to understand the risks, costs and potential benefits in the commercial exploration of space; and why decisions about scientific and engineering solutions need to take account of expert opinions from a broad range of disciplines.  Initially students work...

In this resource students deal with the problem of administering doses of a prescribed drug so that the body does not have too little or an excess of the drug. An understanding of half life is required. Students do not need to use more complicated formulae for...

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...

The Nuffield Foundation provides this activity which can be used to review students' knowledge of the derivatives of quadratic and cubic functions and their graphs. The slideshow provides an introduction by considering a quadratic example and a cubic example.

Dijkstra's algorithm finds the shortest path for a given problem. Dijkstra's algorithm can be used to find the shortest route between two cities. This algorithm is so powerful that it not only finds the shortest path from a chosen source to a given destination, it also finds all of the shortest paths from the...

This exercise is designed to ensure that students know how to find the expected value, E(X), and the variance, Var(X) for a discrete random variable, and that the probabilities in a probability distribution always add to one. Students are given a selection of numbers and are challenged to establish those...