In 2012, the Olympic and Paralympic games will be held in London. These resources look at a wide range of topics that can all be linked to the games. They cover science, technology, engineering and mathematics and can be used in individual lessons or as part of a cross-curricular Olympic and Paralympic theme.

These materials, from Waste Watch (part of Keep Britain Tidy), have been developed to make explicit links between sustainability and packaging for students following GCSE level design and technology courses. The scheme of learning includes suggested activities for five active learning sessions, supported by the...

Students are introduced to 4 different scales of production that they may come across, one-off, batch, mass and continuous through a video clip showing a wide range of products which they need to categorise into a type of production. Details are given on the characteristics of one-off production, and how it can be...

Produced by the Learning Skills Improvement Service, these materials help to demonstrate effective practice. This case study, from Peterborough Regional College, looks at the theme of harnessing technology.

The project set out to determine the impact of virtual resources upon the progress of students using...

This guide is suitable to support a full introductory wearable-technology project using Arduino. It gives an overview of the Arduino system as well as the key terms surrounding ‘making’ and ‘hacking’. After a brief review of basic electrical theory, a closer look at the inputs and outputs of a basic board, and of...

This resource is an introductory lesson to electronic systems. Its content looks at system diagrams (I.e. circuit diagram, flow charts), open loop systems and closed loop systems. Using the key terms input, process, output and feedback, students are given examples of products and asked to describe the system that...

A case study from Mathematics Matters which looks at the development of optical fibres and how mathematical models have simplified the process of producing them. Modern society relies heavily on a variety of networks, but we don’t fully understand how they behave. Mathematical network theory lets us create models...

In this activity pupils will learn about, and experiment with, contrasting colours and geometric shapes to create a final piece inspired by ‘aeroplane paraphernalia’. Pupils will have the opportunity to improve their mastery of art and design techniques, including drawing, painting and sculpture and to discuss the...

Students experiment with prisms and 3D cinema glasses to explain some of the interesting properties of light and their cinematic application.

In this activity, students are introduced to Maglev technology as a way of reducing the friction between the tube and the train in a vacuum tube train. Students are presented with the scenario that in 2025, the UK has been invited to invest £100 billion towards the...

Inspired by the Born to Engineer video from Faye Banks, an engineer who works on the UK electrical network, this resource supports students to increase their understanding of engineering and the design decisions that electrical engineers have to make when creating a new electrical network.

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This resource from the Department for Education develops the 3-D thinking required to move between solid objects and their 2-D nets. The activities are placed in the context of packaging. Students flatten out a packaging box to show the flat 2-D 'net' that made up the whole pack and investigate how the net could be...

The Teaching Primary Science book Paints and materials draws upon some of the materials and techniques of artistic expression to explore ways of asking questions and finding answers in a scientific way. Each chapter contains an activity and a list of materials for...

A collection of resources for GCSE Design and Technology that support the teaching of material properties with different papers and boards.

Pupils will learn about materials and forces, including gravity and air resistance, in this experiment from the IET. Using Christmas as an opportunity to get practical, p...