Using your phone effectively in science

It’s a camera, but better it’s a video camera, and slo-mo at that. Start recording your experiments. Use the phone to make video notes or get an app like Notetalker to record a lesson and all the slides. This makes revision a breeze.

So do you have to write up an experiment? Did the results get messed up? But did you manage to video the experiment - all the equipment is there, how it was setup, what you did, what was said. A photo of the results helps, especially with character recognition and turning results into graphs.

 

The wood and Metal Tube

I have a metal and wood rod. I wrap it with a piece of white paper and then put this into a burner. As I heat the rod one side becomes burnt but the other side ( the metal side) stays uncharred. Why is this?
Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7p-kUshVDk

The Best GCSE Calculator

The features on this make many of the problems much easier to solve.

For calculator papers this the polynomial solving feature alone ( quadratic formula) makes this calculator worth it, but also with the tables, the ratio solver and the simultaneous equation solver makes this calculator a must for GCSE Maths. I know I bought two of them and recommend them to my students.

Casio FX-991EX CLASSWIZ

Ball Bearing in Free fall

A ball bearing being dropped and thrown. taken with a strobe flash. Although the ball bearing on the right is moving towards the right it is falling at the same rate as the ball that is dropped. It doesn't seem obvious but that's science.

Malus Law

Shining a light through two polarising lenses. The first cuts out all the light except in one plane. Rotating the other into a plane at 90 degrees, can wipe out the other. Try looking at a led TV screen (polarised light) with polarising lenses and see what happens as you rotate them.

A Really Sharp Pencil

The most useful item in a student's toolkit is the sharp pencil, long enough to hold and make sure its really sharp. Always have one pencil or better still two. Used lots in Science and Maths too. For graph work a sharp pencil can get an extra mark for those points being accurate, and a sharp pencil improves the line. A good rubber (not one on the end of a pencil) makes the mistakes easier to change.

A tall order "hiding a light under a bushel" and do a fun chemistry experiment about that. But we managed to put the fire under the bushel out with a homemade fire extinguisher