Explore Your Universe: Atoms to Astrophysics Handbook and School Activities

Explore Your Universe is a partnership between the UK Association for Science and Discovery Centres (ASDC) and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). The vision for the project is to inspire a new sense of excitement amongst young people and their families through telling the amazing stories and...

Move It!

Aimed at primary level, this activity pack contains a range of different activities based on the theme of motion. The activities cover a mixture of topics including: states of matter, the water cycle, Earth and Space, electricity, forces and irreversible reactions.

Designed for use in class or within a...

Sixty Second Science

Aimed at primary level, this pack contains a range of different activities which take sixty seconds and are intended to stretch the imagination. The activities cover a mixture of topics including: materials and their properties, Earth and space, forces, living things and their habitats, mathematical puzzles and...

Big Telescopes

The Big Telescopes poster links ground and space based telescopes with the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that they are observing and their locations on Earth or in space.

The poster explains how larger telescopes allow scientists to learn more about the early universe and map our own galaxy with...

AstroZoo

This activity requires students to use computer software to try to save a space borne tourist attraction, AstroZoo, which has various exotic space creatures, but has fallen on hard times. The zoo was once a great success, but bad management has seen oxygen reserves exhausted, creature enclosures overpopulated,...

Explorers

In this activity, students are required to find a safe route through a notoriously perilous region of space called the Twilight Nebula.

They will be faced with a number of different threats but can maximise their chances of survival using a series of threat assessment readouts. Students will compare fraction...

Cooking with Astronauts

This video features celebrity chef, Heston Blumenthal, describing how preparing food on the International Space Station (ISS) is different from that on Earth. Water is used to rehydrate foods and the food cannot be heated with ovens or microwaves. This video was prepared as part of the Great British Space Dinner...

Great British Space Food

This video features celebrity chef, Heston Blumenthal, challenging the viewer to design a British themed meal for astronaut Tim Peake to eat on the International Space Station (ISS). The video features some footage of astronaut on the ISS to illustrate the point that the food will have to be eaten in a weightless...

Gaia's Mission: Solving the Celestial Puzzle

This film documents the mission to create the largest, most-accurate, map of the Milky Way in three dimensions, which will revolutionise our understanding of the galaxy and the universe beyond. On 19th December 2013, a rocket blasted into the sky from a launch site in French Guiana and travelled 1.5 million km to...

Defying Gravity

The 2013 Institute of Physics Schools Lecture - Defying Gravity: Laura Thomas, an independent science communicator with a background in astrophysics, talks about the physics of space flight. She explains how studying physics and mathematics could...