Post-SATS, exams and the warm weather can sometimes mean it’s a real struggle to keep students engaged. But we have a few ideas up our sleeves to make them stand to attention. (We can’t guarantee they will actually stand to attention but we hope the ideas will help you keep them entertained!). 

New Scientist this week published an article on the science behind the TV series Battlestar Galactica which might be able to help.  Try showing a clip as a starter and asking the class to comment on how much of what they see might be possible. You could then give different groups in the class sections from the article as a starting point and then ask them to do some further research. For example into some of the problems astronauts experience in space and how these might be overcome; or different ways it might be possible to generate gravity in space. Bring the groups back together afterwards to report back their findings and ideas to the whole class.  To incorporate ICT even further into the lesson ask them to create a PowerPoint presentation but make sure it isn’t just 5 pages of images from the show!

For a sixth form group try the Wellcombe Trust’s climate health impact game. In this simulation students are asked to take charge of medical and research decisions relating to climate change and are judged on how many diseases they correctly identify and how many people die. You will need to have talked about the greenhouse effect and climate change already as the game will take most of a lesson. Students can either work alone or you could divide the class up so that some are researching the diseases while others are the politicians making the decisions. A chocolate bar for the person with the highest score always goes down well! Once they have tried it out ask them to comment on the types of diseases which were the main problems. Hopefully they will have noticed that diseases with insect vectors could be a particular problem if the climate changes which links nicely to A2 specifications. You can follow up in the next lesson by looking at some of the date relating to the evidence for global warming and its possible effects on plants and animals.  

If you are looking for something topical to include in your science lessons, diabetes has been hitting the headlines recently.

This week it has been reported that diabetes cases have jumped by 60% in the last decade and that more young people are being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.

For a lesson which incorporates “how science works”, try getting your class to investigate the evidence for this rise or to look at the link between obesity and diabetes. Starting points for the search could be:
http://www.diabetes.org.uk/Guide-to-diabetes/Introduction-to-diabetes/Causes_and_Risk_Factors/
http://www.diabetes.org/food-nutrition-lifestyle/lifestyle-prevention/risk-test.jsp

For an interesting practical activity divide your class into patients and doctors, provide the group with “urine” samples (also known as cold tea!), and ask them to work out who is suffering from diabetes. Make sure you remember to add glucose to one of the urine samples first!

You can extend this activity to cover kidney disease too if you add protein to one of your samples.

Our countdown of clips to take and use in your class.

10. And you think table salt is dull?

9. Sonic Boom visualised

Very unusual shots of a sonic boom in action.

8. Superconductors in action.

Tough to explain the underlying physics, but good for challenging more able pupils. Ages 16-18.

7. Egg drop experiment.
A great experiment that can be re-run in schools with help from DT. There is also a more technical version from MIT .

6. Standing waves demonstrated using flames

A YouTube classic, but the physics of longitudinal waves can be nicely explained using this. Ages 14-18.

5. Duff caesium experiment

This doesn’t quite produce the expected bang, but a great way to get the class thinking about safety aspects when designing a less risky experiment.

4. Demo of weighlessness on a zero-G flight.

This is a promotional film, but it is great fun.

3. Relative size of objects in space.
Don’t expect them to recall the star names, but a good illustration of scale. Age 16-18 (A-level).

2. Musical guide to the elements – The elements song!
Short clip to introduce or recap the periodic table.

1. Condensing gas sucks in an egg.

Just such a simple and visual way to demonstrate change in gas volume with cooling. Age 11-16 (GCSE).

There’s a real buzz around what the real reason is for the weird jelly formations people are finding on grassland in the UK. It’s a mystery that a team of researchers from the BBC Radio Scotland ‘Out of Doors’ programme have made their aim to try and get to the bottom of. Suggestions of what these weird jelly-like globules are include something that prey has coughed up, ‘star snot’ – the remains of fallen stars, or a new type of funghi, perhaps as a result of global warming, as some people on the forums have suggested.

Lots of people have differing views on what these weird organisms actually are but Jody Bourton with the help of his friend and wildlife guru Brett Westwood, believes he has the answer. Read his article on star slime ‘My slimeball mystery’

Have a look at the evidence of these jelly organisms and see what you think,







So is this all to do with global warming? And even if it isn’t, could it be a useful starting point for a science investigation? How would we find out if it is animal, vegetable or mineral? What other tests could help determine what it is? Could it be ‘the remnants of fallen stars’? And why not?

If you make this into a topical lesson, do let us know.

We have rapidly expanded our range of science resources over the last few months, and we are now having to be stricter about what gets accepted.

There are still a few areas where more is needed. We would be particularly grateful for material that covers:

• Safe operating of lab equipment (bunsen burners etc)
• Microscopes and images of microscope slides
• Infection diseases (and TB especially)
• Arteries, nerves and other basic anatomy (for A-level)
• Any videos of exciting chemistry experiements

Some of you have asked what are minimum standards are for accepted files. On top of the basic formatting guidelines we have a really simple rule of thumb:

All our files are supposed to save our members AT LEAST an hour of time. If the presentation or worksheet wouldn’t take more than an hour to put together then it is not worth paying for, or uploading to the site.

In essence, if you have put a long time into making your files, sourcing images etc, then they are exactly the sort of contributions we will accept. Keep them coming!

Could Teachable’s resources could replace teachers entirely one day? That’s what I’ve been asked over the last few months, and I can see where they’re coming from. We do have lots of excellent resources for pupils to work through in their own time, and some with very self-contained information (see Balancing Forces or How Fast is Tennis for examples). Where is the need for a teacher?

Well, I believe that the teacher’s role even more important in modern classrooms. No quality resource is able to engage, stimulate and correct in the same way with an incompetent teacher as with an excellent teacher. It is the person at the front of the classroom that inspires children to learn, and makes sure that everyone gets something out of the class.

Today, two reports were published which show what an increasing focus in the UK on testing, rather than teaching techniques, is doing to classroom standards. Professor Peter Tymms, in his report on Perspectives on Education: Primary Science points out that

‘Despite the pass rates, research suggests few students acquire a proper understanding of the science curriculum.

The purpose of science in primary schools should be to foster a sense of curiosity and positive attitudes in the young child. We suspect that the current national approach to science in primary schools is not impacting on children’s scientific thought and curiosity.’

In science especially, but in other subjects as well, teaching the concepts is more important that listing the facts for rote learning. It is the creative and patient teacher who communicates these concepts, not the textbook or video.

On a lighter note, I also read a good tongue-in-cheek comment on a Guardian article about a school employing sixth-formers to help out in classrooms. This is what you get if you take penny-pinching ad absudium:

‘Notes towards modest proposals for reducing the tedious burden of education, education, education upon the public purse.

Teachers: horribly expensive (you have to pay a fortune for staff when they have all those damn qualifications), politically difficult, and rather bolshy. OK so they are fully qualified but do we really need qualified people? Look at those reality programmes on TV. Surely anyone can do anything if you give them a go? Maybe this whole qualification thing is just a stitch-up? Do we really need intelligent, qualified people in the loop? Can there really be any better qualification for anything than the university of life?

Classroom assistants: Much, much cheaper. Happy to be there, happy to help. Lovely people. Not always the brightest stars in the universe and can be a bit dubious on issues such as politics, religion and race, but jolly amenable.

Sixth Formers: Always short of a few quid, so even cheaper and no worries about accidentally employing sex offenders as they’ll be too young to have done anything to get them on the register yet. Dirt cheap.

Caretakers: Always on hand and happy not to be clearing up after the little horrors. Always best to double check their CV by phone though in case the local rozzers’ BBC Micro crashed on the out-of-county perv checks.

Parents: Always complaining about what gets taught and how, so why not get your revenge and have them teach. An hour trying to keep control is usually enough for them: after giving untold sermons on what teachers should be doing, they flee back home complaining about behaviour standards. I agree. I blame the parents.

Still, if we could implement ‘distributed teaching’, send the parents a few FAQs and leave them to it. The wealthy ones can employ tutors if they want. The rest will have to make-do with Wikipedia, Freeview and the net. Given that they copy most of their homework from online sources already, it shouldn’t make much difference. Much cheaper though. Massively reduced education costs. Think of the value of the land for resale. The kids with drive can hit the net and learn for themselves and the rest can be cheap cannon fodder for the job market.’

I hope you all feel confident now that teachers will still be in-demand as far as we can see.

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.

The clear hero of the Beijing Olympics, Usain Bolt, is a bit of a mixed blessing as a role model. Yes, he is an amazing athlete, but he does give the impression that world domination (athletically) is his right, and very little hard work is required. Take the 100m pre-finish celebrations, his ‘jogging’ in the qualifiers or his comment after demolishing the world 200m record that before the race “I woke around 11am and decided to watch some TV and had some nuggets”. Or is this all just a refreshing attitude in an otherwise dull sport?

Dig beneath the bravado and the story is quite different. Like all serious athletes, Bolt has a serious work-ethic and top-class diet that had led to his success. With his show-boating and joking, he is just making light of an arduous and sometimes monotonous existence of body pumping and preparation for the big race. One area where he clearly stands out is his lean physique. In a recent interview with FHM, Bolt does admit a love for junk food, but most of his meals are exemplary mixes of brown rice, tuna, yams and green vegetables. He might get up late, but you can bet most of his waking hours are focussed on building those muscles.

The dietary contrast with Michael Phelps is revealing: where Phelps eats huge quantities of saturated fat and protein just to keep his calorie intake high enough (5 hrs of swimming a day, plus his huge resting metabolic rate, burns over 10,000 calories), Bolt goes for lean protein, fibre and vitamins. That’s pretty much in line with government advice on a healthy diet. Yet the quantities of food these men eat is in a different league to most humans. As one commentator put it, “Michael Phelps burns over 1,000 calories an hour while training. You and I couldn’t burn a thousand calories an hour if we set ourselves on fire.”
OK, I’m sure both athletes have their vices. Bolt claims he is partial to a Guinness and Red Bull (yuk!), and Phelps got stopped for drink driving. But this kind of repeated sporting success requires pretty clean living: you can bet Usain wasn’t partying until the small hours after his 100m win. And when asked about supplements, Bolt admits “I take vitamin C, but that’s it.”

The reality is that Usain Bolt, as with the other Gold Medalists, get to where they are through long-term dedication and single-minded perfection of their sport. Bolt especially is a great role model, showing you can do all this and enjoy yourself as well.

Looking across the Olympics, the great news is that success doesn’t all come down to freakish physique and a one-in-a-million talent. If you aren’t blessed with a 6”5 frame and massive muscles, it’s possible to excel in everything from table tennis to archery. The key ingredient is determination.

If you want to get more ideas for how to incorporate this in a lesson, have a look at our Fuelling Champions resource, or how to prove whether sports drinks actually work.

While watching the splendour of the Olympic games unfold, I was reminded that there is a less sporting story behind some of the success: drug-enhanced performance. Sports that rely largely on physical strength and endurance, and with an oh-so-slight winning margin (under 1% between Gold and Silver in most track events), will always tempt competitors to enhance their performance. We feel rightly indignant when happens, and the sporting authorities try to root it out.

Unfortunately, advances in gene therapy, holding such promise for chronic disease suffers, may give cheats a currently undetectable way to dope and win. An article in The Economist last week highlighted how adding extra copies of gene for a naturally occurring hormone, such as EPO (Erythropoietin, an infamous endurance-enhancing drug), would result in athletes producing more of the drug on an ongoing basis. The process is still experimental, but a single gene therapy session, months before the competition, could result in a sustained increase in endurance or power throughout the season. The key point is that this would not be directly detectable by blood testing: the higher drug levels could be due to individual differences present since birth.
What is more worrying is that this might already be happening: in 2006, during the trial of a German coach accused of doping his underage charges, it transpired that Repoxygen, an experimental gene-therapy product containing the gene for EPO, was already making the rounds on the black market. Who knows whether we already have genetically modified athletes in Beijing?

The parallels with exam results is not that our students are all on drugs (or at least not the performance enhancing kind!), but that an increasing reliance on coursework is making it harder to tell what is a truly the student’s work from is what has been enhanced (whether by plagiarism, ghost writing or plain old copying). It would be alright if, as with gene therapy, there was a sustained performance increase (that’s called progression, and it’s highly prized by OfSTED); but with cheating in coursework it’s the one-off boost that’s both unfair to others and often discourages true learning. Coursework brings benefits for assessing exam-shy students, but in coursework-reliant subjects copying may start to be seen as a risk-free way to success.

Of course, it’s easy enough to tell the cheats when the level of writing is far higher than you would have expected, or the mistakes are truly school-boy (the OFQUAL guide to coursework suggests ‘checking for changes in font size’! ) It’s far harder when you don’t have any points of reference for the candidate, or the copying is subtler. The son of a friend of mine recently fabricated background, results and quotes for his coursework, with some panache, stating that it was ‘what everybody did’. The reality is, that as methods for cheating on coursework improve (from on-line essay banks to increasing sophistication with a word-processor) the incidence of ‘enhanced’ essays and coursework will increase.

Of the many voices that inevitably spring up trying to explain exam grade inflation after this year’s A-level results, not many will be worrying about performance enhance (i.e. widespread cheating). Plus letting some extra B grades get doled out might feel less problematic than the world 100m sprint record falling unjustly. But it is a problem and, as with doping in the Olympics, it’ll be just as bad in 2012.

Why can the smartest kids often come up with the most annoying, disruptive, and irritating ideas?

I can’t remember who said it, but someone famous did comment once that being bored breeds ideas and innovation, and it is good for children to have some down time and boredom in order for them to have the opportunity to be creative and imaginative without framework or limitation. The only problem with this is that if you develop an equation that combines intellect with boredom, adds peer influence, and subtracts constraints, that equals sheer nightmare for a teacher! There are a whole range of ideas and inventions that students have dreamed up under these circumstances, and the pea-shooter is one that reoccurs often.

Teachable went to see the World Pea Shooting Championships last week, held ever year at Witcham, Cambridgeshire. The rules are simple, and the equipment even more so: use straw, pea and a puff to hit the target.

Now, we know that Pea-Shooting is perhaps not a teacher’s favourite sport, but why not use our ideas and inspiration to twist an old student favourite into something the whole class, including you the teacher, can enjoy! The safety precautions are fairly obvious: have a clear target area, and perhaps control the supply of peas so that only one at a time are fired. But a basic pea-shooter can be made with a cheap plastic straws and dried peas, although a range of sized straws and peas will help the experiment. There are some obvious science-related questions to explore:

1. Do smaller peas travel further, or is it about how well the pea fits in the straw?
2. Would a shorter straw help the speed and accuracy?
3. Can the class design a different way to launch peas at the target (but not necessarily test it…)?

And finally, some more off-the-wall ideas to entertain in the last week of term:

Living Without Technology – Research and discuss technological inventions and their impact on our lives. Give up a particular technology for one to two days and keep a journal about the experience (mobile phones or a computer / internet would be a good one to choose). The discussion afterwards can be directed either towards how much impact the science behind these everyday technology has on our lives, or how people in the mid 20th century would have lived without them. (Ages: 7-14, Subjects: Science, Citizenship, History).
Science and Disablity – Investigate technological innovations that help people with disabilities to communicate, and list design features you would want to include in a personal digital assistant (Ages: 11-16, Subjects: Health & Fitness, Science & Tech, Topics: Chronic Conditions. Communications & Computing. Design & Invention)
Programming a Pizza – Design the sequence of steps needed to make a pizza, create an algorithm of the steps and simulate programming a robotic device to “create” a pizza (Ages: 11-16, Subjects: ICT, DT).