Though school is out for the summer, ninth- and tenth-grade students at Union Intermediate High School are burning off energy playing a game of tag on the soccer field. But that is not all they are doing. They are also synthesizing and applying key chemistry concepts they have just learned related to the conditions of the early solar system. They…

After years of using Rube Goldberg-inspired projects to teach concepts of simple machines, the author sought a comparable project to reinforce electricity lessons in his ninth-grade Science and Technology course. The Friendship Detector gives students a chance to design, test, and build a complex circuit with multiple switches and battery-powered…

A major goal of education is to help learners store information in long-term memory and use that information on later occasions to effectively solve problems (Vockell 2010). Therefore, this author began to use the Rubik's cube to help students learn to problem solve. There is something special about this colorful three-dimensional puzzle that…

During discussions about planning, Tim Kemp and Charlotte Bickmore recently concluded that despite the name they give to their major Year 8 unit (The Making of the United Kingdom), they tend mainly to focus on England, and even more especially, on London. They have a good point. Ask an average Year 8 student to describe Britain in, say, 1700, and…