”When you tell people you make stars for a living, their heads turn and their mouths open.” The video features Dr Kim Cave-Ayland who is a control engineer at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE). 

These resources explores how engineers have used their knowledge of waves to improve lives.  The activities include:

• Using the reflection of light to create a floating image
• Investigating the best material for thermal resistance (insulation) in a survival suit

Curriculum links...

From the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, this resource helps students to consider the allocations of funds to one or more malaria intervention projects. In groups they must discuss the pros and cons of different the projects and decide which should receive funding....

Produced by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, these materials help students to understand how malaria is tackled in an area where it is endemic. In this activity students are given a scenario where they are allocated the role of malaria programme managers for a...

This book, produced by the Technology Enhancement Programme (TEP) includes six design challenges. These cover:

• Engineering in miniature
• Simple mouldings: design and manufacture of an injection moulded product
• Designing and making a 'hi-tech' pen • Designing and making a desk top...

This publication, from the Technology Enhancement Programme (TEP), helps students to understand the manufacturing process through a series of design challenges. Each has a specific brief and the topics include:

• Designing and making a helping hand
• Robotics: designing and making a walking robot...

This field study encourages students to investigate the vegetation in a lowland heathland habitat and to use a GPS unit to map habitat fragments. Students could also make management decisions, deciding where to place habitat corridors to help prepare for the possible effects of climate change.

Four...

This SMILE resource contains two packs of games, investigations, worksheets and practical activities supporting the teaching and learning of mappings, from simple arrow diagrams to working with composite functions.

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Produced by Solar Spark, this activity allows students to model the energy changes happening inside a photovoltaic cell. In a solar cell, electrons move to make an electrical current. The electrons act like the marbles in a marble run.

Marbles at the top of the run flow downhill through the run to the...

This activity puts speed-time graphs in a space context by looking at the elliptical orbits. 

In order to understand the orbits of planets, comets and other celestial bodies, it is necessary to examine the principles of how gravity, and the velocity of an object, interact to produce an orbit. It is a common...

Computers are usually programmed using a “language,” which is a limited vocabulary of instructions that can be obeyed. This activity gives students some experience with this aspect of programming. The resource begins with a demonstration of the marching order activity followed by the activity itself, together with...

Act 1

An animation shows a floating raft in a marine that...

Mark Richards is a scientist and a DJ (DJ Kemist). He was born in Nottingham in 1970 to parents who had emigrated from Jamaica and remembers successfully 'battling with the boffins' at his comprehensive school, often coming top in chemistry.

Following a degree in chemistry, he has worked (getting a PhD along...