In the Zone is the Wellcome Trust’s major NEW initiative inspired by the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. It provides a fun, free and fascinating way of using science to discover how our bodies work during sport, activity, movement and rest.
The website is aimed at both primary and secondary schools with two different sections. Both sections contain interactive games which can be used on the interactive whiteboard.
Teachers packs are available for download containing lesson plans, worksheets and ideas for science investigations.
If you are working in a UK school then keep an eye out for the In the Zone pack which is being sent to every school in the UK in Feb/March. Each box contains a teaching guide, curriculum guide, challenge cards and all of the scientific equipment you need to do the investigations on the website. Make sure your office staff know it’s coming, and not to put it in a cupboard.
Finally, something from The Sun newspaper actually worth reading Hold Ye Front Page covers great moments in history/science told through the front pages of The Sun newspaper. A fun way of introducing a topic or sparking a discussion on the importance of these events/discoveries
The Kitchen Pantry Scientist blog contains some great ideas for simple science experiments you can do with kitchen items, and as such makes them very useful for the average Primary classroom too!
Science Made Simple is a series of 15 animated short videos produced for a New Zealand TV channel aimed at demystifying commonly used, but little understood, scientific and technological jargon. The series focuses on the sort of words viewers may read in the newspaper, but don’t always understand.
Quite a few of you had no idea that arthropods such as Spiders, insects and Crabs/Lobsters need to shed their external skeletons in order to grow. Here’s a video of a lobster doing just that.
The Institute of Physics’ ‘Ever Wondered Why? Roadshow’ is a touring physics-based show that brings the wonders of Science to secondary school pupils up and down the country. Through a series of experiments and spectacular demonstrations, it shows how so many truly mind-boggling natural phenomena are based on physics – like why the sky’s blue, the Sun’s hot or the stars twinkle.
A series of videos covering the roadshow experiments is now live on their YouTube channel, demonstrating a number of different topics that would prove useful to any Physics teacher.
This workshop is part of the Stimulating Physics Network, you can find out more information here: www.stimulatingphysics.org
This series of videos have been produced by the National STEM Centre and the Institute of Physics. They are mostly aimed at teachers and illustrate how to perform simple demonstrations and use particular pieces of equipment. The videos use apparatus that should be available in most secondary school science departments.
Some topics also have versions of the video that could be used with students in the classroom.
The topics covered in the videos are:
Demonstrating diffraction using laser light
Static electricity and charge with an ‘electric sausage’
Using an electron diffraction tube
Gravity and the motion of projectiles with the Monkey and Hunter demonstration
Transmission of electricity along power lines
Demonstrating thermal conductivity
Using a Van de Graaff generator
A simple wave machine
Most of the videos also come with links to download the video file, plus downloadable teachers notes.
These resources were originally part of the Science Year CD produced by the ASE nearly 10 years ago. For a while after that they were also available on the ASE website, but recently I noticed that the website links were no longer working. A shame as there were some great materials there.
I recently found them on the National STEM Centre website – who seems to be archiving a lot of the old ASE resources, amongst other things.
The Inside Body resource from the Association for Science Education (ASE) provides a template that students use to produce their own ICT presentations on the effects of a substance on the body.
By completing this activity students improve their ability to select relevant information for a presentation, develop their ICT skills and increase their knowledge on the effects of alcohol, tobacco and solvents on the human body.
Students are provided with a background resource document from which to select information. They insert this text into their presentation. They choose relevant pathological images, which are provided on the PowerPoint template, and use these to illustrate their presentation. They can also insert information that they have researched from other sources.
There are some very gruesome images that you can use in presentations about drugs/alcohol/tobacco and their effect on the body. Suitable for KS3/KS4 pupils.
The rest of Science Year resources are available here.
