This Core Maths task asks the question ‘How do you know if you are really unwell?’ The activity explores the data surrounding body temperature, shows how to summarise continuous data and explores the effect on summary statistics that changing the size of the class interval has.

Body temperature:...

This unplugged activity, from the CS4FN team at Queen Mary University of London, helps learners to understand variable assignment and operations. They use the idea of variables as boxes as the basis of a group activity, developing their use of logical thinking to trace variables through programs.

The...

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 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 activity from the Nuffield Foundation shows students how to use Kruskal’s and Prim’s algorithms to solve minimum connector problems. A cable TV company wants to lay cables to connect the towns, laying the cable along the roads shown on a map of the Isle of Wight. They want to connect all of these towns to...

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 activity students are invited to play a game using non-transitive dice, and explore the probability behind them.

Champion of the world: Teacher guide
This teacher guidance gives an overview of the task including prior student knowledge, suggested approaches and...

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...