In September 2006, after a pilot phase, a new national curriculum for science was introduced for students aged 14-16 in England and Wales. Jenifer Burden explains how the new curriculum seeks to address both the scientific needs of all citizens, and the additional needs of future scientists.
Teaching science in the classroom is all very well, but wouldn’t it be wonderful to let your students learn for themselves what it’s really like to work in a research laboratory? Sooike Stoops from the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB), Belgium, describes a project that does just…
Ages: 14-16, 16-19; Topics: Biology, General science
Films about science or even pseudo-science can be powerful tools in the classroom. Jenna Stevens from the CISCI project provides a toolkit for using the film Erin Brockovich in chemistry and ecology lessons.
The worldwide web is a wonderful source of information, but the sheer amount of content can be overwhelming. Where do you start looking for science news? In each issue of Science in School, we will suggest useful websites for particular purposes.
Does Anything Eat Wasps? is a user-friendly, easy-to-read collection of questions and short answers that covers a wide range of science topics, from galaxies colliding in outer space to the amount of fat necessary to render a human bulletproof. These questions and their corresponding answers were…
Tim Harrison and Dudley Shallcross from the University of Bristol, UK, describe some of the University’s activities to share a delight in chemistry with school students.
Sometimes in the wealth of detail of modern science, we lose sight of the unifying factor: the scientific method. Alfredo Tifi, Natale Natale and Antonietta Lombardi explain how they encourage the skills of enquiry, hypothesis and testing.
Ages: <11, 11-14; Topics: Physics, General science
The worldwide web is a wonderful source of information, but sometimes the sheer amount of content can be overwhelming. Where do you start looking? In each issue of Science in School, we will suggest useful websites for particular purposes.
Would you know how to turn a bucket into a seismograph, how to make a scale model of a DNA double helix from cans and bottles, or how to simulate a human eye with the help of a shampoo bottle? Barbara Warmbein from the European Space Agency in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, finds out.
There is a natural way to tell a tale: begin at the beginning and end at the end. Standard biographies, for example, start with the forebears, in many cases the grandparents, and end with the protagonist's death.
