Lab
See the idea. Put it to the test.
956 practicals from Kindergarten to Year 12, in 9 subjects. A practical gives the idea, what you need, the steps, what you should see and a safety card. A teacher-led practical gives the idea and its hazards; its method is for tutors on the learning platform.
Review
Reviewed before publication (owner’s confirmation, 24 September 2026). That covers every practical here, and a practical’s page lists the sources its author read.
A safety card on every page
The risk, who supervises and the hazards. The 38 teacher-led practicals show their idea and hazards here; their materials, steps and sources, and any result, control or note that states a number or an amount, are for tutors and administrators on the learning platform.
School laboratory, not for home
207 practicals are medium or high risk. Each says so on its page: In a school laboratory, with a teacher supervising, under the school's risk assessment. Not for home.
Curriculum references
Each practical lists the NSW syllabus outcomes and Australian Curriculum v9 codes it supports. They are references, not a verified or complete curriculum alignment.
Find a practical
122 practicals
Biology · page 3 of 3
Evaporative cooling and the limit of sweating: wet-bulb and dry-bulb temperatures
Sweat cools the body only by evaporating, and a wet thermometer bulb shows the lowest temperature evaporation can reach, which rises toward air temperature as humidity rises and so sets a limit to thermoregulation.
Practical, model not builtLow riskExtracting DNA from split peas or onion
Breaking cells with detergent, stripping proteins with a protease and adding cold ethanol pulls the long DNA molecules out of solution as a visible mass.
PracticalMedium riskFlower dissection and hand pollination of rapid-cycling brassicas
A flower's parts are organised for pollen transfer and fertilisation, and moving pollen by hand between chosen parents is the basis of artificial pollination in plant breeding.
PracticalLow riskFrequency of PTC tasting in a class and the allele frequencies it implies
PTC tasting is often treated as a trait with dominant inheritance, and under that simplification the fraction of non-tasters gives the recessive allele frequency by Hardy-Weinberg; the University of Utah page cautions that tasters vary greatly in sensitivity and that the PTC gene has about 85 percent of the influence, so the figure is an estimate under a simple model.
Practical, model not builtLow riskGel electrophoresis of food dyes and a size calculator for DNA fragments
Charged molecules travel through a gel at speeds set by size and charge, and a ladder of known sizes calibrates the gel. Food dyes stand in for DNA fragments: the gel shows the separation step that DNA profiling depends on, without running any DNA and without reading an inheritance pattern.
Teacher-led practicalPractical, model not builtMedium riskHand hygiene: fluorescent lotion under ultraviolet light and fingertip plates
Washing removes microbes only from the surfaces it reaches, so a fluorescent stand-in for germs shows which parts of the hands a technique misses and fingertip plates show how far each treatment reduces the microbes that grow.
Teacher-led practicalPracticalMedium riskHeart rate, breathing rate and oxygen saturation before, during and after exercise
Exercise disturbs the body's internal environment and heart and breathing rates rise to correct it, then fall back toward resting values, while blood oxygen saturation stays nearly constant: a negative feedback response the learner can measure on themselves.
PracticalLow riskKoch's postulates with blue mould rot of apples (Penicillium expansum)
A microbe is shown to cause a disease only when it is isolated from the diseased host, grown in pure culture, used to reproduce the same disease in a healthy host, and isolated again.
Teacher-led practicalPracticalMedium riskLamb kidney dissection: cortex, medulla, pelvis and ureter
The kidney's outer cortex, inner medulla and central pelvis are the visible regions of the kidney's filtering units (nephrons), and seeing them explains what dialysis must replace when kidney function is lost.
PracticalMedium riskMicrobial testing of water and food samples on nutrient agar
Microorganisms invisible in a water or food sample grow into countable colonies on a nutrient medium, so a plate count measures how contaminated a sample is.
Teacher-led practicalPracticalMedium riskMitosis in an onion root tip squash and the mitotic index
Growing root tips are full of dividing cells, and a stained squash shows every stage of mitosis at once so the fraction of cells dividing can be counted.
Teacher-led practicalPracticalMedium riskModelling DNA replication and the Meselson-Stahl test of three models
Each strand of a DNA molecule is a template for a new complementary strand, so every daughter molecule keeps one old strand, and the pattern of heavy and light DNA across generations distinguishes this semi-conservative model from its rivals.
Practical, model not builtLow riskModelling haemodialysis with Visking tubing and why fresh fluid is needed
In dialysis, small solutes diffuse from blood across a partially permeable membrane into dialysis fluid until concentrations equalise, large molecules stay behind, and only fresh fluid keeps removing waste.
Practical, model not builtMedium riskModelling meiosis, crossing over and fertilisation with Reebop chromosomes
Independent assortment, crossing over and random fertilisation together give each offspring a genotype that no sibling need share, and a physical model makes each source of variation countable.
Practical, model not builtLow riskNear point, amplitude of accommodation and why reading glasses become necessary
The lens changes shape to focus near objects, and the closest point a person can focus (the near point) measures how much it can change, an amount that falls with age until reading needs added lens power.
Practical, model not builtLow riskPasteur's swan-neck flask experiment with sterile nutrient broth
Sterile broth stays clear when air can reach it but dust cannot, and clouds only once airborne microbes get in, so microbes come from other microbes rather than arising from the broth itself.
Teacher-led practicalPracticalMedium riskResponse of Australian native plants to Phytophthora dieback: a no-contact field survey
A soil-borne water mould kills the roots of susceptible native plants, and the pattern of dieback across a site, mapped without touching or moving soil, shows how the pathogen spreads and which plants respond by dying back.
PracticalMedium riskTesting simulated urine for glucose and protein: evidence of diabetes and kidney damage
When blood glucose rises above what the kidney tubules can reabsorb, glucose appears in urine, and protein in urine signals damaged filters, so simple tests on urine reveal failures of homeostasis.
PracticalMedium riskTracing the spread of an infection: the fluid-exchange epidemic with an indicator test
A hidden infection passed on by direct contact spreads through a group faster with every round of contact, and a record of who met whom lets the source be traced back, though never beyond the first pair.
Practical, model not builtMedium riskUltraviolet protection measured with UV-sensitive beads under sunscreens and fabric
Ultraviolet radiation, the main environmental cause of skin cancer, can be detected by beads that change colour, and the reduction in colour change under a sunscreen or fabric shows how much ultraviolet it screens out.
Practical, model not builtLow riskVitamin C in fruit juices by DCPIP titration: a nutritional disease investigation
Vitamin C decolourises the blue dye DCPIP in a fixed ratio, so the volume of dye a juice can decolourise measures its vitamin C, the nutrient whose lack causes scurvy.
Practical, model not builtLow riskWater treatments compared by plate counts: boiling, chlorination and filtering
Treatments that kill or remove microbes reduce the number of colonies a water sample can grow, and plate counts before and after measure how well each treatment works.
Teacher-led practicalPracticalMedium riskMeasuring cells with a calibrated eyepiece graticule
A drawing or description of a cell stays qualitative until the microscope is calibrated; a graticule checked against a stage micrometer turns each observation into a measurement with a stated uncertainty.
PracticalMedium riskMendel’s law of dominance: his counts, a bead model and a chi-square test
Mendel’s law of dominance predicts a 3 : 1 ratio in the second generation; his own counts and a bead model test whether departures from 3 : 1 are within chance.
Practical, model not builtLow riskSlaters in a damp and dry choice chamber, with a chi-square test
Counting where animals settle turns a behaviour into quantitative data, and a statistical test shows whether a small sample is enough to support the pattern the eye sees.
PracticalLow riskPriestley’s restored air made measurable: algae and hydrogencarbonate indicator
Priestley inferred that plants restore air that burning or breathing had spoiled; hydrogencarbonate indicator lets a learner measure the same effect as carbon dioxide removed in light and added in darkness.
PracticalLow risk
For tutors and administrators
The materials and steps of every teacher-led practical are on the learning platform, with the safety card first. Sign in with a tutor or administrator account to read them.