This resource contains 20 instant maths ideas designed to provide students with the opportunity to: * explore reflections of two dimensional shapes * investigate what happens when coordinates are transformed * decide whether the human face is symmetrical * design patterns exhibiting rotational symmetry * explore...

This activity considers the probability of events happening and involves calculating simple probabilities and expressing them in terms of fractions and words. Children consider the probability of real events. They then work out the chance of choosing a certain sweet...

Two friends, Albert and Betty, agree to meet for lunch. Their starting locations and possible meeting point are shown on a grid. Students are asked to explore the best place for the two friends to meet, given certain conditions (e.g. only four blocks away from Albert). There are six challenges to attempt with...

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...

This resource, aimed at primary level, links to work on light and Earth and Space. Looking first at the principles behind how a telescope works, it provides activities in which children explore the nature of light, the role of concave and convex lenses in focussing light to form an image and on making a ‘Home TV’....

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...

This resource contains eight instant maths ideas, designed to provide students with the opportunity to investigate which polyominoes tessellate, which triangles tessellate, which quadrilaterals tessellate, design their own shape that tessellates and find tessellating patterns in art and nature. Student resource...

This resource provides an activity idea and a recording sheet for testing how sound travels away from a source. In the activity children learn to recognise that the sound heard from a source gets fainter as the distance from the source increases.

This resource has been provided by Sigma Science.

The aim of this activity is to raise awareness of human interface design issues. In a world where poor design is rife, people have become accustomed to dealing with problems caused by the artifacts with which they interact, sometimes blaming themselves instead of attributing the problems to flawed design. The issue...

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...

In this resource, aimed at Key Stage Two and Key Stage Three, students are asked create a pyramid to represent the food groups in a balanced diet, considering how many portions of each food type should be eaten each day. The resource would link to studies about food, diet and health, and the life processes and...

This resource, from the Maths Careers website, explores decimal numbers, predicting terms of a sequence and geometrical pictures and was produced in conjunction by More Maths Grads and the Queen Mary University of London.

The activity invites students find the maths hidden in everyday images, before...