These physics resources for students in Years 9-11 are part of the BRaSS initiative and should be used in conjunction with the Teachers' Pack. There are five lessons of approximately 50 minutes’ duration and teachers are free...

This resource, from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, begins with a video that names and describes some the different layers of the atmosphere, with the aim of explaining where the ...

This resource, from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, explores magnetism and how it is used in a compass. It is aimed at key stage 2, but the activities would also be suitable for introducing magnetism to key stage 3.

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In this resource, students use real data to explore the conditions on Mars, and use their knowledge of the red planet to answer the question “Should humans or robots explore Mars in the future?”

The resource contains two activities:

• Conditions on Mars - students use real data and their...

This activity, from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, is designed to help students find out all about the Moon, and some of the other 200+ moons that orbit other planets in the solar system.

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This resource, from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, discusses a range of topics about how the Sun, planets, asteroids and/or moons have been formed over millions of years.

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National Moon day commemorates the day in 1969 when the astronaut Neil Armstrong was the first person to step on the Moon. This was a ground breaking moment for human-kind.

The resources in this list use the Moon to teach about various topics including:

• the phases of the Moon
• light and...

The Inventive podcast uses storytelling to encourage listeners to find out more about engineers and what they do.  In each episode, Professor Trevor Cox interviews an engineer, and then a writer uses that interview as inspiration for a piece of fiction. The podcast brings...

This resource, from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, has a video that introduces the evolution on the universe beginning at the Big Bang, but it also has a worksheet that explores how mass loss through nuclear fusion can explain the prodigious ...

This resource, from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, is a video that explains why the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere experience different seasons at the same time. It uses clear diagrams and animations to demonstrate how the tilt of...

This activity sheet is based on the Inventive Podcast.  It introduces a spacecraft engineer Sian Cleaver, and links her work to a physics topic. The activity sheet also supports Careers Benchmark 4: Careers in the curriculum by introducing a career and role model. There are also links to short audio clips of Sian...

This collection includes some activities for primary and secondary aged pupils which could be linked to Star Wars day.  

There are several activities looking at exoplanets and the search for alien life elsewhere in the Universe, which could be used to challenge the scientific validity of the film series....

This resource, from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, is a beautifully animated video giving a short overview of the life cycle of stars, but crucially how, from Earth, we can observe the different phases of star evolution by plotting all the...

This resource, from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, introduces the age of the current universe and what its final fate may be.

The video answers some questions...

Rockets are used to launch satellites, probes and even astronauts into space. A rocket launch is extremely impressive. Thousands of kilograms are burned in just a few minutes in order to provide the force that the rocket needs in order to overcome the gravity of the Earth. Rockets provide an exciting context to...