Imaging the Earth

Combing satellite and ground-based imagery, this cross-curricular learning resource for primary teachers explores planet Earth from a range of perspectives.

The activities are intended to build map skills and recognition of many physical geography features in familiar and unfamiliar locations. Mathematics...

Tomorrow’s Engineers careers resource pack

Tomorrow’s Engineers careers resource pack for teachers, ambassadors and advisers to use with groups of students.

This resource pack is intended to inform and inspire young people and their influencers about the exciting opportunities presented by a career in engineering. The pack contains useful guidelines...

Engineering themed Postcards

A series of themed postcards showing exciting areas where engineers are making a difference: electronics, medicine, power, products, space, sport, transport and water.

These A6 postcards, aimed at students aged 10 to 14, are designed to showcase the broad and exciting range of careers available in...

Viva Las Vegas

This activity shows how Earth observation can be used to study human geography by comparing the satellite images of Las Vegas over the last few decades. Linking to measurement of irregular areas and addition and multiplication of fractions, it asks children to measure the area of Las Vegas at three separate times...

Seeing Temperatures

This activity allows students to investigate how images are produced from data streams by using first a spreadsheet and then an image-processing program. They then go on to see how the usefulness of such a monochromatic image may be enhanced by using lookup tables and calibration. The materials used focus on the...

Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror

In August 2012, an unmanned rover touched down on the surface of Mars. NASA's Curiosity Rover was sent to take measurements of the atmosphere and martian terrain in an effort to understand more about the history of Mars and whether the planet ever sustained life. This video shows an animation of the incredible...

Building Images

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.

Born to Engineer - Andrew Robertson

Andrew Robertson is a computer engineer working at Queen Mary, University of London on music signal processing. 

He has engineered a software package that allows bands to drive the tempo of their music to the response of the crowd and still keep their layered backing tracks in time with the beat. This film...

Bee-Bots Basics

This introduction to using the small programmable robot, the BeeBot, introduces children to creating simple programs. They learn the importance of sequences of accurate instructions, and test their sequences out using a 'fakebot' or paper-robot. Children are encouraged to debug and develop their sequences before...

Data Representation

The first video explains why computers use binary to store data.  The difference between a bit, nibble, byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte and petabyte is explained.  These are known as measurements of capacity, or how much data can be stored either in memory or on secondary storage devices.

The...