Last week was the annual British Association Festival of Science in Liverpool. Among the cutting-edge science on display there were some great ideas to inspire your science lessons. Here is a quick round-up:

• Physics of Football – as the new football season gets underway, this is a take on how spin allows David Beckham to direct the ball, while no spin help Christiano Ronaldo give goalkeepers the slip.
• Evolution demonstrated in humans – even though homo sapiens has only been around for under 50,000 years, we are still evolving. A good example is the gene for a protein that allows us to digest milk: this has recently evolved and so is present in some communities and not others.
• Linking breaking points to Twin Towers collapse – After you’ve run through the usual breaking-point tests using steel wire, why not ask the class what was different about the Twin Towers. Of course, the steel there was designed for the weight of the building, and the metal didn’t actually melt. Apparently, it all to do with how steel behaves when heated – it becomes very malleable and ductile.

Finally, there was an interesting talk by a Professor Reiss, the Director of Education at the Royal Society. He is an ordained minister in the Church of England, and has a PhD from Cambridge University in evolutionary biology and population genetics. While he obviously believes in the validity of the theory of evolution and its place in science classes, he observed, after teaching biology for 20 years, that pupils with strong religious beliefs were just alienated by scientific arguments about Evolution. He contends that a better way to engage them is to ask them to explain how the theory of evolution COULD explain the development of species, and allow them to express their own opinions about how it does work.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 6:54 pm and is filed under Science, Teaching Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.