On December 15th 2015 European Space Agency astronaut Tim Peake launched on the six month Principia mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Principia was named after Isaac Newton’s Naturalis Principia Mathematica, describing the principal laws of motion and gravity.

The education and inspiration of...

In this project, students use Autodesk Homestyler to design a living space for a disabled client. The design must include a ground floor living space with outdoor landscape. The overall plot must not exceed 25m x 60m and the living space must not exceed 10m x 40m. Students create a customer profile to base their...

Standards Unit: Improving Learning in Mathematics professional development materials. Features notes and presentations describing the active learning approaches.

Getting started To encourage participants to: * reflect on their current assumptions, beliefs, and teaching practices; * consider...

This is a resource aimed at students aged 11-14. It is one of a series that support the use of the BBC micro:bit in the classroom. The pack contains several lesson plans, presentations and student handouts. The first ‘unplugged’ lesson introduces students to how programmable systems work, the second they are walked...

This series of three lessons introduces Python programming to students in secondary school. The lesson objectives include:

• Creating simple code including the input and print scripts
• Using "If statements" to make a decision
• Using the random function in programs

Detailed...

Produced in 2015, these resources look at the development of encoding messages and how technology and science has developed to allow us to keep messages secure. Looking at unintuitive quantum properties of light, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principal and entanglement, students will see how keys can be shared to ensure...

This activity examines the meanings of the terms reduce, reuse and recycle. Students consider the efficacy of recycling and reusing and whether they produce the desired results of reducing waste and energy requirements and minimising primary resource use. They then compare the impacts of recycling aluminium to...

This magic trick from the Computer Science for Fun (CS4FN) team at QMUL is based on a ‘self-working trick’. It includes a set of instructions which, so long as the commands are followed, works every time. It is, therefore, an algorithm.

The trick involves playing cards – the actual value of the cards is not...

This resource features a task that involves interpreting functions that arise in practical situations.

Students are given the task of matching together worded descriptions, functions, and graphs. An example of a worded situations is a movie subscription where you get two movies free, but then you get charged...

This resource develops the concept of representing inequalities on a Cartesian coordinate grid. Students work with algebraic representations in a variety of formats and then shade the relevant areas.

An initial activity is to play a game ‘Hunting the target’. This involves students being given inequalities...

This resource develops the concept of what the different algebraic forms of a quadratic function reveal about the properties of its graphical representation. Particular attention is paid to:

• How the factored form of the function can identify a graph’s roots.
• How the completed square form of...

This lesson develops the concept of using trigonometry to model a real-world situation. In particular students will:

• Model a periodic situation, the hight of a person on a Ferris wheel using trigonometric functions
• Interpret the constants a, b, c in the formula h = a + b cos ct in terms of the...

This starter activity can be used as an introduction to reverse engineering. Using the presentation Earphones and Headphones, students are asked to identify the product and its function. They consider the following questions: