FLEET outreach impact

Over the years, FLEET has conducted a variety of outreach events with schools and the general public. Most of the events were evaluated using recognized pre- and post-evaluation methods to understand the impact of the event relative to our strategic goals. The methods are outlined in the reports below. This page contains the reports for all evaluated events from 2021 ...

Forces and Energy: Energy and Work

What do we mean by energy? Energy is the capacity of a physical system to do work or cause a change. We will examine what this means in detail below, but to help establish students’ baseline understanding of energy get students to do Activity 1. What is energy? Why is understanding energy important? When we design and build stuff important ...

Home Science: Activities with teacher resources

The activities in this section are linked to the Australian Curriculum and explore to a greater depth the concepts of forces and motion, light, energy and electricity. Each activity can contain worksheets, teacher notes, experiments, critical thinking exercises images, videos and links to further information. 5 Jan 2022Why were flights cancelled in Phoenix Arizona?8 Oct 2018Water Bender28 May 2018Under pressure: ...

What is an atom? Like us, mostly empty space it seems…

I have found two things the younger students struggle to conceptualize about an atom: Students perceive that an atom is an atom – they are all one in the same; and they struggle to conceptualize the massive amount of space between the nucleus and electrons. I offer some ways to help students visualize/conceptualize the atom more accurately The basics Atoms ...

FLEET Schools

FLEET Schools is a resource for primary and secondary teachers and students to engage with physics and chemistry, and to learn and think about the research problems FLEET is working on. That problem is our ever increasing energy requirements coming from our for rapidly increasing computation demand. Think Internet of Things, AI, driverless cars, smart phones and gaming. To solve ...

FLEET schools: Conductors, insulators and electricity

Introduction From the dawn of time we have witnessed electricity as a primal force of nature in the form of lightning. The ancient Greeks would rub amber with a cloth and get small electric shocks – the same static electricity we experience when we rub our feet along the carpet and then touch something conductive, for example a metal bench ...

Balloon Rocket

Make a rocket with just a balloon, string, straws and sticky tape. See how far and how high you can go. Learning intentions Students examine and apply Newton’s law of motion (action and reaction). For older and more advanced students they will learn about Newton’s 2nd law and the relationship between force, mass and acceleration: F=m/a. See experiment 2. Download ...

Skittles Rainbow

A little bit of colourful chemistry, a bit of art and a lesson in density and concentration gradients. Yeh, you will need a lot of skittles, but it is all for science. Download the full worksheet including worksheet tables and images. Learning Intentions Students will examine and be able to describe/understand the following: What happens when materials are mixed The ...