This Oftsted publication takes a look at the state of technology in schools shortly after the implementation of the National curriculum. It provides commentary on teaching and learning; curriculum and organisation; assessment, recording and reporting; staffing and staff development; accommodation and resources....

Produced in 1993, this National Curriculum Council document was written to respond to the Secretary of State for Education’s proposals to address issues with the National Curriculum for technology at the time.

The key responses to the proposals include:
*The scope of ‘technology’– clarifying the...

Written the year after the introduction of the National Curriculum, this report from the Department of Education and Science specifies the Attainment Targets expected of students at all stages of compulsory education in technology. Programmes of Study are described, along with examples of work that students could...

This CS4FN activity from the team at Queen Mary University of London highlights some issues encountered during the design of human-computer interfaces (HCI). It acts as an introduction to HCI, introducing the need to translate problems and to understand how people behave.

The activities include a robot...

In this activity, children learn that a shooting star or meteor is a piece of rock that lights up as it travels through the Earth’s atmosphere. They also work scientifically to investigate how craters are formed when a meteor...

Produced by ARKive, these materials include a series of activities that introduce children to the plants and animals of the temperate rainforest in the Pacific Northwest (USA). Children conduct a hands-on investigation of the living things in a small local ecosystem, catalogue their findings and then compare their...

The Art of the Science Teacher, from the Nuffield Fundation, was published by the Science Teacher Education Project to provide background reading suitable for both student-teachers and serving teachers. Each chapter was written by experienced classroom teachers who had also been involved in teacher education. The...

This resource contains a colourful comic, aimed at Key Stage Two, where children learn about the properties of materials and then design an investigation on dissolving. It promotes enquiry skills in a context, looking at how to create a fair test by changing one...

This practical activity allows children to visualise how Sickle Cell Anaemia can affect blood circulation around the body. Children walk or run around a classroom-sized simulation of the human body, carrying red blood cells away from the heart and blue blood cells back...

This resource, aimed at primary level, helps to develop an understanding of pollination and how flowers attract insects. Linked to the topics of lifecycles, plants and living things and their habitats, it provides an opportunity to identify and name wild flowers, whilst investigating the frequency of different...

This resource provides a lesson about digestion in humans, linked to curriculum objectives. It is structured around a series of captivating, educational films. The films highlight the structure and function of the key organs of the digestive system, focusing on what happens at each stage on food's incredible...

This curriculum linked resource, for primary children and their teachers, is based on the exciting real-life launch of the Euclid space telescope. Through simple models and practical activities, the children are introduced to the work of space scientists seeking to discover more about our universe.

The...

This activity looks at the shape of the Earth and the reasons why we have day and night. It includes a game “The Earth goes on a Spin”; in which children role-play the Sun and the Earth. In other activities children think about the sounds that are heard during day and night. The activities require the use of an...

By creating their own paper ‘robot face’, students learn about how high-level language is translated into low-level machine instructions. The resource, created by Paul Curzon and Peter McOwan of the CS4FN team, covers sequencing in programs, compilers and interpreters. A detailed instruction sheet guides the...

This magic trick from the Computer Science for Fun team at QMUL shows that computing is about more than just programming and computational thinking is about more than just algorithms.

A simple mathematical approach is taken with dealt piles of cards – this allows the dealer to control the whereabouts of the...