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
35 practicals
Earth and space · Earth's structure and changing surface
Testing rocks: scratch, streak, fizz and soak
Rocks and minerals have observable, testable properties, hardness, streak colour, reaction with acid and water absorption, that tell us what they are made of and what they are useful for.
PracticalLow riskAcid rain on limestone: chalk dissolving in vinegar
Chemical weathering dissolves some rocks, and calcium carbonate in chalk or limestone reacting with a weak acid loses mass that a balance can track, with the fizz as carbon dioxide.
Practical, model not builtLow riskFreeze-thaw weathering: ice cracks a plaster rock
Water in a crack expands by about 9 percent when it freezes and can split rock, a slow change that a plaster brick with a water-filled cavity reproduces in a freezer overnight.
PracticalLow riskRock tumbling with sugar cubes: physical weathering by the shake
Rocks knocked together in a river or by waves lose their corners and shed grains, and shaking sugar cubes in a jar measures that wear as mass lost against number of knocks.
PracticalLow riskStream table: watching water carve a landscape
Moving water erodes, transports and deposits sediment, and a tray of sand on a slope shows the channel, the load and the fan forming, with slope and flow as the variables that change them.
PracticalLow riskShake table: which structure survives an earthquake?
Sudden shaking of the ground in an earthquake pushes structures from side to side, and a frame braced with triangles on a wide base resists the shaking far better than an unbraced rectangular frame, which is why buildings in earthquake zones are braced.
PracticalLow riskA mantle plume in a beaker, and why convection is no longer the plate engine
Heated viscous material rises as a plume and spreads at the surface, which models hotspots; the same demonstration shows how a model once taught as the cause of plate motion was replaced when better evidence pointed to slab pull.
Teacher-led practicalPracticalMedium riskBuild a micro:bit seismometer and record a classroom quake
A seismometer records ground shaking against time; a home-built one shows that the record's size falls with distance from the source, while locating a real earthquake needs arrival times at several stations.
PracticalLow riskChemical weathering: carbonic acid from your own breath on limestone
Carbon dioxide dissolving in water makes carbonic acid, and that weak acid dissolves limestone and marble; the same reaction shapes caves and weathers gravestones.
PracticalMedium riskCooling rate and crystal size with molten salol
Slow cooling gives atoms time to join large crystals, fast cooling freezes many small ones; that is why granite is coarse and basalt is fine.
PracticalMedium riskFreeze-thaw weathering of porous rock in a freezer
Water expands by about 9 percent when it freezes, so water in pores and cracks levers rock apart a little more on each freeze, and porous rocks fall apart first.
PracticalLow riskHow far has Australia moved in your lifetime: plate motion from the national datum
Plates move a few centimetres a year, a rate a class can set beside its own fingernail growth; Australia's motion is large enough that the country's map coordinates had to be moved by about 1.8 metres between 1994 and 2020.
Practical, model not builtLow riskIsostasy: pieces of wood floating in water and in syrup
Crust floats on the denser mantle the way wood floats on water: a thicker or lighter piece stands higher and has a deeper root, which is why continents stand above the ocean floor and why crust thickened where plates converge rises as mountain ranges with deep roots.
Practical, model not builtLow riskLocating an epicentre from S minus P times at three stations
P waves outrun S waves, so the gap between their arrivals grows with distance; three distances drawn as circles cross at the epicentre.
Practical, model not builtLow riskMaking conglomerate and sandstone: cement, compaction and time
Loose sediment becomes rock when a cement grows in the pores between grains, a process the class can run in days that nature runs over millions of years.
PracticalLow riskMineral identification: hardness, streak, lustre, cleavage and acid
Each mineral has fixed physical properties, so a short set of tests separates minerals that look alike and shows why rocks made of them behave differently.
PracticalMedium riskPlate boundaries in a box: folds, thrusts and a spreading ridge with transform offsets
Pushing layers together folds and thrusts them upward (convergent), pulling paper out of slits models new sea floor forming at a ridge (divergent), and the offsets between slits behave as transform faults.
PracticalLow riskPlotting recent earthquakes and volcanoes to find the plate boundaries
Earthquakes and volcanoes are not scattered at random; plotted on a map they trace narrow belts, and those belts are the plate boundaries.
PracticalLow riskRiver in a gutter: erosion, transport and deposition
Flowing water erodes, carries and drops sediment according to its speed, so a steeper or fuller channel moves larger grains and a slowing flow builds fans and deltas.
PracticalLow riskSee how they run: lava viscosity, temperature and added sand
Hotter and less silica-rich lava is runnier, flows further and builds broad shield volcanoes; cooler, stickier lava builds steep cones and can trap gas until it explodes.
PracticalLow riskSorting a rock kit into igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic
How a rock formed is written in its texture: interlocking crystals from cooling melt, cemented grains or layers from deposited sediment, and aligned bands or sheets from heat and pressure.
PracticalMedium riskChemical weathering of limestone: reaction of calcium carbonate with dilute acid
Carbonate rock dissolves in acid at a rate set by surface area, concentration and temperature, the same chemistry that forms caves and soil from limestone.
Practical, model not builtMedium riskClassifying rocks as igneous, sedimentary or metamorphic with a dichotomous key
Texture (crystal or grain size, layering, foliation) and mineral content record how a rock formed, which is what a rock classification key reads.
PracticalLow riskCrystal size and cooling rate with salol on warm and cold slides
Slow cooling grows large crystals and fast cooling grows small ones, which is why intrusive and extrusive igneous rocks of the same composition look different.
PracticalLow riskDensity of crust, mantle and core materials and what it tells us about the interior
Surface rocks are far less dense than the whole Earth, so the interior must hold much denser material, which the layered model reproduces.
Practical, model not builtLow riskIdentifying minerals by hardness, streak, lustre, cleavage, acid test and specific gravity
A mineral is identified from a fixed set of physical properties that follow from its composition and crystal structure, applied through a dichotomous key.
PracticalLow riskModelling divergent, convergent and transform boundaries and the features they build
Each boundary type produces a characteristic set of features, rift and ridge, trench and fold mountains, offset faults, which simple sand and card models reproduce under the same motions.
PracticalLow riskSea-floor spreading and magnetic stripes: a magnetised-pin model and the spreading-rate calculator
New crust forms at a ridge and records the magnetic field of its day, so on each side of the ridge a stripe’s width equals the half spreading rate multiplied by the length of that polarity interval.
Practical, model not builtLow riskThe continental jigsaw: fitting the continents at the edge of the shelf
The continents fit at the continental shelf edge rather than the coastline, and matching rocks and fossils across the join are evidence that they were once one.
PracticalLow riskThe S-wave shadow zone: modelling why the outer core must be liquid
S waves cannot pass through liquid, so stations more than about 103 degrees from an earthquake record no direct S waves, which fixes the size and state of the outer core.
Practical, model not builtLow riskA scale model of geological time from the International Chronostratigraphic Chart
Almost all of Earth history passed before complex life; a scaled timeline built from the chart’s numerical ages makes the proportions of the eons and the brevity of human time visible.
PracticalLow riskMaking mould, cast and trace fossils in clay and plaster
A fossil is usually not the organism but the shape it left, a mould, the filling of that shape, a cast, or the mark of its activity, a trace.
PracticalLow riskSediment layers in a jar: superposition, grading and reading a sequence
Sediment settles with the oldest layer at the base, coarsest grains first in each pulse, which is the rule that lets a rock sequence be read in order.
PracticalLow riskStrike, dip and the order of events at an outcrop or road cutting (fieldwork)
Beds are laid down close to horizontal, so a steep measured dip records tilting or folding that came after deposition; with superposition, cross-cutting relationships and unconformities, strike and dip readings put the events at an outcrop in order.
PracticalMedium riskEarthquake-resistant design on a shake table: resonance, bracing and base isolation
A building sways most when the ground shakes near its natural frequency; bracing raises that frequency and base isolation lowers it, both moving the structure away from resonance as Newton’s second law predicts for a mass on a spring.
Practical, model not builtLow 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.